Wagoner won't get the cash all at once, but rather over time and in the form of retirement benefits, reports ABC News. The U.S. Treasury Department had already blocked GM from paying out severance benefits to Wagoner or any other top-level exec as part of the strings attached to its federal loans package.
The big retirement fund does stand at odds with the figures underlying Wagoner's tenure at GM: 47,000 jobs lost, over $13 billion in government loans and tens of billions of dollars lost outright.
On the other hand, those familiar with GM's products over the past 2-3 years might argue Wagoner oversaw one of the most dramatic turnarounds in GM's history, with the bottom simply dropping out of the market before the product revival could bear any fruit. But whatever one might think or feel about Wagoner's term at the head of GM, it's over now and both must go their separate ways. For Wagoner, that may be a comfy retirement.
For GM, it's a much tougher matter to determine what the future holds.
