March 30 (Bloomberg) -- General Motors Corp. Chief Executive Officer Rick Wagoner was forced out after President Barack Obama’s task force decided he was unable to craft a plan to save the automaker he ran for more than eight years.

Wagoner, 56, said he agreed to an administration request to leave. Chief Operating Officer Fritz Henderson will become CEO and director Kent Kresa will succeed Wagoner as chairman. GM had been seeking as much as $16.6 billion in new U.S. loans after an initial installment of $13.4 billion.

“It’s very hard for the government to write a big check without giving some evidence of change,” said John Casesa, managing partner at New York-based consulting firm Casesa Shapiro Group. “This will also give the government moral authority with the other stakeholders to make them sacrifice.”

Wagoner became a symbol of the failing U.S. auto industry in recent months after flying to Washington via corporate jet to ask for aid. Since taking over in 2000, he presided over $82 billion in losses during the past four years and yielded GM’s title as the world’s top-selling carmaker to Toyota Motor Corp.

His exit caps an unsuccessful five-month push to win U.S. aid without losing his job. Forced to work for $1 a year and to cede most of his corporate perks, he had said he wouldn’t resign unless compelled. On March 27, 129 days after Congress’s first hearing on the future of GM, he got that call.

Administration Request

“On Friday I was in Washington for a meeting with administration officials,” Wagoner said today in a statement. “In the course of that meeting, they requested that I ‘step aside’ as CEO of GM, and so I have.”

Henderson, 49, was promoted by Wagoner to COO a year ago after serving as chief financial officer. He previously ran GM’s operations in Asia and Europe.

GM plunged 92 cents, or 25 percent, to $2.70 at 4:15 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading after an administration official said yesterday that bankruptcy may be the best option for the biggest U.S. automaker and No. 3 Chrysler LLC.

“The bailout loans aren’t hugely popular and that’s creating an issue for Obama,” said Jeremy Anwyl, CEO of Edmunds.com in Santa Monica, California, which tracks vehicle pricing and consumer behavior. “One way to make the loans more palatable is to be able to say the person responsible is no longer with GM.”

Cutting Jobs, Plants

GM had said it will shed 47,000 jobs globally in 2009 and plans to close five assembly plants. Executives said the Detroit-based automaker will focus on four U.S. brands, down from eight, and eliminate thousands of dealers.

Wagoner oversaw those plans to meet the terms of the rescue unveiled on Dec. 19 by then-President George W. Bush, after Congress balked at a bailout for GM and Chrysler. CEO Robert Nardelli will stay at Chrysler and must complete a planned alliance with Fiat SpA within 30 days, an Obama administration official said.

Obama’s task force pointed to GM’s failure to win concessions from bondholders, a step needed to cut the automaker’s debt and ensure future viability, as one reason the government needed a new plan.

Tumbling Bonds

GM’s latest debt exchange offer, made March 24, wasn’t likely to win bondholders’ approval because it’s less lucrative than the terms the U.S. required for the company to keep the first $13.4 billion in loans, a person briefed on the talks said. The bondholders didn’t seek Wagoner’s dismissal, the person said.

The government will push for even deeper reductions in debt now, the administration official said.

GM’s 8.375 percent bonds due July 2033 fell 2 cents to 16 cents on the dollar, yielding 52 percent, according to Trace, the bond-price reporting service of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. They traded at 71 cents on the dollar a year earlier.

Lampooned on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” comedy show and lambasted by Congress for his private-jet flight, Wagoner said this month that he hadn’t been asked by the government or GM’s board to quit and that he intended to finish the restructuring.

Feeling Responsible

“It’s important and I feel like I have a responsibility to do it,” Wagoner said in a March 19 interview. “I plan to stay here until we get things well in shape and on track and beyond that, we’ll see.”

He joined GM in 1977, as U.S. automakers were fending off Japanese competitors that recognized a decade earlier that they would need to build fuel-efficient vehicles.

As CEO, he initially bet against gasoline-electric hybrid vehicles, focusing research on hydrogen technology while keeping the current lineup centered on pickups and sport-utility vehicles. GM offered its first full-scale hybrids in 2007, a decade after Toyota’s Prius debuted. He pressed for development of the Volt plug-in electric car when gasoline prices soared.

He used the purchase of South Korea’s Daewoo Motor Co. to expand GM’s overseas sales 51 percent to 5.5 million cars and trucks by 2007. That same year, he wrung concessions from labor unions, including cutting wages in half for new hires and offloading retiree health care to a union-run trust by 2010.

In 2006, Wagoner fended off billionaire Kirk Kerkorian’s push for an alliance with Renault SA and Nissan Motor Co.

“Maybe you can fault him for being too cautious,” Edmunds.com’s Anwyl said. “The real need for the loans is because the economy has fallen so much, which no one anticipated.”

New CEO

Henderson, 49, headed GM’s European operations and was group vice president for the Asia-Pacific region before becoming CFO in January 2006.

As European chief starting mid-2004, he led an effort that included cutting 12,000 jobs and oversaw that region’s first profit in five years. He started at GM in the treasurer’s office in New York in 1984.

Henderson as finance chief led efforts that raised about $21 billion, including selling assets such as the Allison Transmission unit and a 51 percent stake in the GMAC LLC finance unit, to pay for job cuts and develop new models while posting annual losses. He also stepped in to help resolve a labor agreement at Delphi Corp., the bankrupt auto-parts maker that is a former GM unit and is still the automaker’s largest supplier.

“Fritz is the obvious choice,” said Casesa, the consultant. “He’s run every region, he’s been No. 2 and he knows where all the bodies are buried.”

New Chairman

Kresa, 71, a former CEO of Northrop Grumman Corp., joined GM’s board in October 2003. His other directorships include Northrop Grumman, Fluor Corp. and Avery Dennison Corp., where he is chairman. According to Bloomberg data, Kresa holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

“I knew Kent Kresa from his days as a Chrysler director,” Delphi Chairman Steve Miller said. “He’s bright and insightful about how the auto industry works. He’s a very good choice.”

Steven Rattner, the lead adviser for the U.S. Treasury on Obama’s car task force, said as recently as March 20 that the future of Wagoner and Nardelli hadn’t been decided.

“They’re good guys really trying hard to run those companies and I have nothing bad to say about them,” Rattner said in a Bloomberg Television interview. “The decision about what we do about management will get wrapped up, ultimately, in the configuration of these companies.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Jeff Green in Southfield, Michigan, at jgreen16@bloomberg.net; Doron Levin in Southfield, Michigan, at dlevin5@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: March 30, 2009 17:22 EDT