DETROIT Tracinda Corp., the investment company controlled by billionaire Kirk Kerkorian, on Monday said it has purchased 20 million additional shares of the Ford Motor Company, raising its stake in the automaker to about 5.5 percent.
Tracinda's tender offer of $8.50 a share represented a significant premium over the market price of the stock, which closed Monday at $6.36. The investment group said Ford stockholders offered to sell it more than 1 billion shares nearly half of the automaker's 2.24 billion outstanding shares.
The Ford family owns about 3 percent of the stock but controls 40 percent of the voting rights through a special class of stock.
So far, Kerkorian and his chief lieutenant, former Chrysler executive Jerry York, have been generally supportive of Ford's management team, led by CEO Alan Mulally. Among their few suggestions is that Ford should kill the Mercury brand a move that already appears to be in the works.
Before Kerkorian's recent push at Ford, the 91-year-old investor briefly owned about 10 percent of General Motors, selling his stake in December 2006, and made a $4.5 billion offer for Chrysler in 2007, before parent Daimler sold a controlling interest to a private equity group headed by Cerberus.
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