What’s in a name? Ask the folks at Cerberus Capital Management, named for the three-headed dog that guards the gates of hell.
Managers of the private equity firm like to stay out of the limelight, an impossibility given Cerberus’ ownership of Chrysler.
As Reuters noted yesterday, Cerberus co-founder Stephen Feinberg is in the untenable position of seeking government funds to rescue a privately held company:
Feinberg – a frequent contributor to Republican coffers — seems content to let fellow executives John Snow, a former treasury secretary in the current Bush administration, and Dan Quayle, who was vice president under former president George H. W. Bush, be the famous names at his company.
Snow’s title is chairman of Cerberus Capital Management. Quayle is chairman of Cerberus Global Investments.
It has been Snow who has been the public face of the Chrysler deal. Snow talked in a press release at the time of the deal about the “inherent strength of U.S. manufacturing and of the U.S. auto industry” – a judgment called into question by the current economic crisis.
Cerberus has pledged that federal assistance would be used to shore up Chrysler, and would not flow back to the investment company.
Chrysler chief Bob Nardelli told a Senate committee Tuesday that Cerberus “has made it clear that it will forgo any benefit from the upside that would, in part, be created from any government assistance that Chrysler LLC may obtain.”
Although Republicans have vociferously opposed a bailout for the automakers, Feinberg is a generous supporter of the GOP. Earlier this year, he gave $28,500 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
When Cerberus bought Chrysler in 2007, Feinberg was hailed as a man who might save Detroit. In retrospect, the task seems as impossible as Katie Couric saving network news.
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