GM's Talks With Ghosn May Be for Kerkorian's Benefit

PARIS This is a column in which sources are unnamed, motives questioned, unpublished truths told, and opinions given.

It is a column about corporate ambition, anger, greed, and intrigue -- all terribly human traits, played out at the headquarters of France's Renault SA in the Ville de Boulogne-Billancourt and in the boardroom of General Motors Corp., still the world's largest car company despite current market and financial challenges.

It is a column about villains, so-named because it is my column, which gives me ample leeway to label characters as villains as I see them. The two villains in this case are billionaire investor Kirk Kerkorian and Jerome B. York, Kerkorian's representative on the GM board. They are the men of Tracinda Corp., a private investment house in Beverly Hills, Calif., that reaped billions buying and selling Las Vegas casinos.

Kerkorian, now in his eighties, is a recluse of a man who pays others handsome sums to do his public bidding through Tracinda, which he named after his beloved daughters Tracy and Linda. York is an executive who demonstrated in his long career in American business, including stints at Chrysler Corp. and at International Business Machines Corp., that he cares little about the "American" in American business. He also has shown that he cares less about the human value of corporations if the sum of a company's parts is worth more than the price of its whole.

Joining Kerkorian and York is Carlos Ghosn, a citizen of France who is Brazilian by birth, a man of Faustian ambition who now serves as president and chief executive officer of both Renault and Japan's Nissan Motor Co. Ghosn has designs to bring GM into an alliance with his two companies in a grand scheme to subdue that rapidly growing Corporate Enemy of the East, popularly known as Toyota Motor Corp.

It has been suggested in numerous background interviews here and in quiet venues adjacent to the Paris Motor Show that it was Ghosn who initiated the alliance talks, going directly to Kerkorian and York and presenting his designs of corporate empire, whetting York and Kerkorian's financial appetites.

"Carlos has these dreams of putting Toyota in its place," said one GM executive who, like all other GM executives interviewed for this column, seven in number, spoke only on condition of anonymity. "We think that's crazy. We're talking to him only to see if there is something there that could add value for GM, its customers and stockholders."

"Would you be talking to Nissan and Renault if you weren't under pressure to do so from Kerkorian and York?" I asked the GM executive.

"Hell, no!" the GM executive said. "Look, it was Carlos who went around starting this thing, and now that it's started, we, of course, will do due diligence on behalf of our board. But we're in the middle of a very big turnaround in our global operations. We're having lots of success with that. All of this [Nissan-Renault alliance] stuff is just one big distraction."

An 'Amicable' Meeting

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It was Wednesday, Sept. 27, in Ville de Boulogne-Billancourt, the village that has long been home to Renault. Propriety demanded that the people from GM pay their respects to the leaders of Nissan-Renault.

So, GM chief executive Rick Wagoner and his gang did the right thing and visited Carlos and his buddies. Publicly, Wagoner and Robert A. "Bob" Lutz, GM's voluble chairman of product development, described the meeting, which lasted for three hours and 15 minutes, as "amicable" and "productive."

Privately, sources on both sides familiar with that meeting say it was "polite" and "respectful," much in the manner of a parley between gangs, both well-armed and fully capable of causing mutual harm, discussing a division of territory.