Taxpayers Unlikely to Recover GM, Chrysler Investment. (Bloomberg)

Sept. 9 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. taxpayers are unlikely to recover their $81 billion investment in General Motors Co. and Chrysler Group LLC and were “left in the dark” on specifics of a decision to aid automakers, a congressional panel said.

The Treasury Department should consider placing its GM and Chrysler ownership stakes into an independent trust to prevent “political pressure and government interference,” the Congressional Oversight Panel said in a report today. “Even if no direct conflict exists, a trust could prevent the use or appearance of political influence in the government’s ownership,” the panel concluded.

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The panel said GM stock would need “highly optimistic” returns in order for the full investment to be repaid. The panel, which oversees the U.S. government’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, raised questions about the Obama administration’s transparency in aiding automakers and challenged the Treasury Department to make more disclosures about company decisions and the government’s future role.

“Congress and ultimately the American taxpayer have been left in the dark concerning details of Treasury’s review process and its methodology and metrics at a time when Treasury committed additional TARP funds to these companies,” the panel said.

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“The Treasury auto team failed to disclose to the public both the factors and criteria it used in its viability assessments, the scope of outside involvement in its evaluations, and its basis and reasoning for selecting particular benchmarks,” according to the report. “Simply, its disclosures did not go far enough.

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For GM, repayment of TARP would require government shares of the new GM to be worth $40.7 billion, assuming other debt is repaid. That means the market cap of the entire company would need to be $67.7 billion, the report said.

In April 2008, when old GM shares were at their highest, the company’s total value was $57.2 billion, the panel said. The figure is not adjusted for inflation.

“New GM will have to achieve a capitalization that is higher than was ever achieved by Old GM if taxpayers are to break even,” according to the report. ”