Shareholders meeting site moved to Detroit

DETROIT (AP) — General Motors Corp. has decided to move its annual meeting from Wilmington, Del., to Detroit to save money and increase shareholder participation, a company spokeswoman said Tuesday.

The company also will delay the meeting for two months until Aug. 4 as it grapples with a huge restructuring plan and tries to meet the conditions of its government loans.

“It’s just going to be less expensive to do it in Detroit,” company spokeswoman Julie Gibson said.

GM has had its annual meetings in Delaware since 1995 because the company is incorporated there, Gibson said. The meeting has not been in Detroit since 1990. In the four years before 1995, the company moved the gathering to cities near GM factories including Shreveport, La.; Oklahoma City; Fort Wayne, Ind.; and Nashville, Tenn., Gibson said.

Meetings normally took place at the storied Hotel duPont in downtown Wilmington, where rooms and suites run from $199 to $1,249 per night.

GM’s board decided to delay the meeting mainly because of the amount of business that must be conducted before the usual annual meeting date in early June, Gibson said. The board believed it would be able to give shareholders a better perspective on the company’s operations if it waited, she said.

GM, trying to weather the worst U.S. sales slump in 27 years, is surviving on $13.4 billion in government loans and has requested up to $16.6 billion more. The struggling auto giant faces a March 31 deadline to finalize a plan to show the government how it will become viable and be able to repay the loans.

But significant aspects of the plan, such as dealer and brand consolidation and up to 47,000 employee layoffs worldwide, will not take place until later in the year or beyond.

At its annual meeting, shareholders elect GM’s board of directors, which now has 12 members. Two members, Percy Barnevik and Ellen Kullman, have stepped down since the last meeting in June 2008, Barnevik for personal reasons and Kullman because she became chief executive of the DuPont chemical company.

Shareholders also pick the company’s independent accountants and vote on proposals from shareholders.

GM said shareholders of record as of June 12 will be able to vote at the annual meeting, and the deadline for submitting stockholder proposals is March 31.