Kerkorian to sell 14m GM shares

DETROIT -- Billionaire investor Kirk Kerkorian may have decided that casinos are a better bet than cars.

The dissident General Motors Corp. shareholder said yesterday that he will slash his stake in the troubled automaker by selling 14 million shares for about $462 million.

The sale, disclosed in a regulatory filing, came on the same day Kerkorian's Tracinda Corp. said it plans to offer about $825 million for up to 15 million shares of MGM Mirage Inc. The transaction, at $55 per share, would boost Kerkorian's stake in the ownership of the Bellagio in Las Vegas and other casinos to more than 60 percent.

In the GM filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Tracinda said it had agreed on Monday to sell the shares at $33 each in a private transaction. The agreement will close tomorrow, the filing said.

Kerkorian now owns 56 million shares, or 9.9 percent of GM, according to the LionShares.com financial website. The sale would reduce his stake to 42 million, or 7.4 percent of the company's 565.5 million outstanding shares.

Tracinda -- which is solely owned by Kerkorian -- already holds 158.4 million shares of MGM Mirage, or 56.3 percent of the company's outstanding stock.

GM shares closed down $1.52 to $31.09 on the New York Stock Exchange.

MGM Mirage shares rose $5.21 to close at $54.21 on the Big Board.

Tracinda spokeswoman Carrie Bloom said she could not comment on the GM transaction. "GM's practice is not to speculate on the motivations of its shareholders," said spokeswoman Renee Rashid-Merem.

The struggling GM lost just over $3 billion during the first nine months of the year, and its US sales are down 9.4 percent. It has cut production and reduced costs by winning healthcare concessions from the UAW and persuading about 35,000 hourly workers to leave under early retirement or buyout plans.

GM also said yesterday it is walking away from plans to develop a family of minivans due to a shift in product strategy that has the automaker focusing on the growing crossover segment.

While the automaker now sells minivans under various brands, sales of those models are on the decline and the vehicles are scheduled to be phased out late in the decade. GM had been working on a plan to launch a completely redesigned series of minivans in 2009 that would have shared an architecture with full-size crossover SUVs that are just now hitting the market.