Obama says "not going to meddle in GM's decisions"

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama underscored on Wednesday that his administration did not want to meddle in the decisions of General Motors GM.UL and said he was pleased GM may repay government loans sooner than expected.

Asked in a Fox News interview if he opposed the use of U.S. government bailout funds for an overseas operation such as GM's European unit Opel, Obama said: "We are not going to meddle in GM's decisions."

"We are a shareholder but we are not an active shareholder," he said while traveling in Asia.

"We have specifically said that we are not in the business of running a car company. We're not getting involved in day-to-day management," he said.

GM announced on Monday it would start repaying the $8 billion in senior debt owed to the United States and Canada, the same day it reported a $1.2 billion loss for a bankruptcy-shortened third quarter.

Obama welcomed that message.

"I was pleased to see that GM thinks it may be able to repay some of the U.S. government loans sooner than anticipated -- that's something we'd encourage," Obama said.

Separately, the head of the administration's autos task force told Reuters that the government would reevaluate in June GM's repayment plan.

"We have the right to extend it. We could ask them to pull it down. We could leave it as it is. We could just keep the billion (dollar payments) going," Ron Bloom, who oversees the government's 61 percent stake in GM, said in an interview. "We could do any of those or some combination of the above.

Obama made the comments in Beijing in an interview to be aired on Fox News Channel's "Special Report with Bret Baier" later on Wednesday. Excerpts were released ahead of the broadcast.

A top GM executive said on Tuesday the auto maker could cut up to 10,000 jobs as part of its European restructuring plan.

(Reporting by Caren Bohan in Beijing, Jeff Mason, David Lawder, Kevin Krolicki and John Crawley in Washington; Editing by Philip Barbara)