General Motors Co. investors urged a judge to let their lawsuit proceed against the automaker’s board, which they say was asleep at the switch while the company produced cars with faulty ignition systems that led to fatal accidents, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. More than a dozen current and former GM directors failed to adequately oversee the company’s operations for about three years starting in 2010 and had no system to ensure that the Detroit-based company produced safe vehicles or reported problems to government regulators, Peter Safirstein, a lawyer for pension funds suing GM, told a Delaware judge yesterday. “What we had here is a total systemic failure to supervise that amounts to a conscious dereliction of duty,” Safirstein told Delaware Chancery Court Judge Sam Glasscock III at a hearing in Georgetown, Del. Confirmed deaths tied to GM’s defective ignition switches stand at about 50, four times more than the company estimated through much of 2014, according to a January report by Kenneth Feinberg, a lawyer hired by GM to oversee an out-of-court compensation fund for recall victims. Last year, GM said in regulatory filings that it had recalled 34 million vehicles worldwide through September and spent $2.7 billion on repairs, loaner cars and other costs of the call-ins.
