GMAC LLC said Tuesday it wants its share of financing of General Motors Corp. (GM) vehicles to return to levels seen before the credit crisis.

"We hope to get back to where we were before," Robert Hull, GMAC's chief financial officer, said during a conference call with analysts and investors discussing the lender's first-quarter results.

Hull declined to provide guidance around future financing levels.

GMAC, the financing arm affiliated with GM, funded 17% of the auto maker's retail sales in the first quarter, compared with 49% a year earlier. GMAC funded 32% of the auto maker's retail sales in 2008 and provided 81% of the financing to GM dealers.

Hull also didn't rule out the re-entry of GMAC in the leasing market. "If there's a way we can make leasing work, we will," he said. GMAC ceased financing leases after lower used car values forced the lender to take a $1.2 billion impairment charge on its operating lease portfolio last year.

On a separate note, Hull said GMAC could meet its 2009 debt maturities without government funds "if necessary." But, he added, this may result in "brakes" on lending volume.

More than four months after turning itself into a bank, GMAC is still waiting for the green light from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to sell cheaply priced debt insured by the FDIC as part the Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program.

GMAC has $30.6 billion of debt maturing in 2009, including $11.8 billion of unsecured debt. Gaining access to cheap capital through the TLGP was a major driving force behind the cash-strapped lender's bank registration in December.

Hull said GMAC could issue less than $10 billion and more than $5 billion under TLGP. This amount is less than what the company estimated if it had received the go-ahead earlier from the FDIC. The reduced amount stems from TLGP guidelines related to the debt maturities of a company. The guidelines dictate how much debt a company can issue under the plan.

Early Tuesday, GMAC posted a first quarter loss of $675 million, aided by a $631 million gain from extinguishing debt. But without this gain, GMAC's loss totaled about $1.3 billion.

GMAC is jointly owned by GM and an investor group led by private-equity firm Cerberus Capital Management LP. The auto maker and the investor group will significantly scale back their ownership in GMAC as a condition of the lender becoming a bank-holding company in December.

-By Aparajita Saha-Bubna, Dow Jones Newswires; 617-654-6729; aparajita.saha-bubna@dowjones.com