GE nominates 3 directors to its board

FBN's Tracee Carrasco on General Electric announcing it will restate the last two years of earnings as it adopts new accounting standards.

General Electric (NYSE:GE) Monday nominated three new candidates for its board of directors ahead of its annual shareholder meeting in April.

The candidates include former Danher Corp. (NYSE:DHR) CEO Lawrence Culp, former American Airlines CEO Thomas Horton and former Financial Accounting Standards Board Chairman Leslie Seidman.

Culp spent 14 years at the helm of Danaher, and led the company during its transformation from an industrial manufacturer to a science and technology business. He has been a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School since his retirement in 2014 and currently serves as a senior adviser to Bain Capital Private Equity.

As the chief executive of American Airlines, Horton ran the restructuring effort and was at the helm when the air carrier inked an order for 460 single-aisle planes from Boeing (NYSE:BA) and Airbus, valued at $38 billion, in 2011. Horton also led the airline’s eventual merger with US Airways (NYSE:LCC) in 2013. He now is a senior adviser at Warburg Pincus LLC and is also the presiding director of Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM) and a director at Walmart (NYSE:WMT).

The former chair of the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), the non-profit organization responsible for establishing generally accepted accounting principles in the U.S. During her 10 years at FASB, the board issued standards on stock compensation to business combinations. She left FASB in 2013, and is the chair of the audit committees at Moody’s and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), where she also serves as a public governor.

The move to reshape its board comes amid a corporate turnaround effort, after the company faced a difficult 2017. The company said it would restate its earnings from 2016 and 2017 in a 10-K regulatory filing released Friday, in order to adopt a new accounting standard. The restated earnings per share will be cut by 13 cents for 2016 and 16 cents for 2017.

GE is also part of an industry-wide investigation of subprime mortgages involving the Department of Justice. In the filing, the company disclosed it was issued subpoenas for GE Capital and its WMC Mortgage arm, now defunct, as part of the review. It is cooperating with all inquiries.

The company also announced in mid-January that it would take a $6.2 billion after-tax charge over the fourth quarter of 2017, following a review of its GE Capital insurance portfolio. It said GE Capital expects to make statutory reserve contributions of $15 billion over seven years.