Last Friday’s special report about faulty refrigerators started with a fire in a London tower block. After oil and gas correspondent Tom Bergin read about the fire he started to investigate the actions of Arcelik, a Turkish company that made the fridge the London Fire Brigade pointed to as a possible cause. There seemed to be inconsistencies in the company’s version of events.

“What I found interesting was uncovering who knew what, when. As soon as one constructed a timeline, it was evident that the EU guidelines had not been followed, even as those involved claimed to be guided entirely by these guidelines,” said Bergin. “That was probably the most interesting and rewarding because the rules were designed to protect people.”

As our story shows, Arcelik was informed by the London Fire Brigade some of its Beko fridges could pose a fire risk years before it informed its customers. When the company did take action, it decided to send out letters and did not follow EU suggestions to use the media to alert consumers to possible dangers.

The British press had not investigated whether Arcelik’s behavior constituted a breach of EU or UK regulations and Bergin believes Arcelik’s effective stonewalling, and newspapers’ disinterest in small stories like domestic fires, stopped the national press from digging deeper into the faulty fridges.

“It takes a great deal of time…Stonewalling often can be very effective, unfortunately, and we live in a country where the libel laws are so restrictive that even suggesting a company has behaved inappropriately poses big risks for news organizations,” he said.

Bergin was the invited to Arcelik’s British headquarters after the company realised Reuters was investigating the story – as far as we know the only British journalist to visit.

“A few weeks into it, it was quite clear to them that we were putting the time and effort into the story that meant we would quite likely come up with a compelling account of what happened and that we understood the rules, that we were making investigations in many different sources…Simply stonewalling wasn’t an option in the face of our persistence.”

Deutsche Bank analyst Paul Sankey says the U.S. oil major may overshoot its $10 billion target for asset sale by 50 percent. He reinstated coverage of ConocoPhillips with a “buy” rating, crediting the rising premiums the company has been able to command. So far, Conoco has raised more than $5 billion from the sale of stakes in its Canadian oil sands venture, Syncrude, to China’s Sinopec and the stake in a truck stop joint venture to Pilot Travel Centers.

Sankey expects about $1.5 billion to $2 billion from Conoco’s North American assets, including $1 billion from its 25 percent interest in the Rockies Express pipeline. This would bring the total asset sale proceeds to about $7 billion this year — well ahead of the company’s target of $5 billion, he said.

Conoco has been selling to cut its spiraling debt. That may not be as dramatic an incentive as what is going on in the Gulf, but could mean BP may tap into the same demand for oil and gas assets to pay for its clean-up efforts. If you believe the forward price curve for oil, buying assets now may be the best chance to prepare for the coming price increases.

Certainly the price action is pointing towards increasingly juicy premiums. News today that Total has agreed to buy UTS Energy for $1.42 billion in cash, twice the amount the French oil major offered for the Canadian oil sands developer 18 months ago, should be encouraging for other sellers.

BP is still looking at asset sales, but those efforts are being eclipsed now by more exciting prospects of direct investment in the company. Buy ratings are popping up again.

How seriously did people doubt a big oil company’s ability to survive a crisis, even a badly mismanaged one? After all, this oil we’re talking about. Not some revolutionary technology that can be reproduced by anyone with a computer. There’s a heap of value in them thar wells for energy hungry humanity – a whole lot more than there is sympathy for oil-choked wildlife. Note: the tar balls may have kept Independence Day beach-goers away, but don’t think for a moment they didn’t turn on the air conditioning in their RVs when the mercury hit triple digits this weekend.

In asking sovereign wealth funds for money, BP is following in the footsteps of banks. The SWFs’ investments in banks ended up losing big money for the investors, but the funds might feel differently about BP. Energy, after all, is a business that sovereign funds in the Persian Gulf, Singapore, and oil-hungry China know well.

Of course, there would be a whole lot less risk if they just picked up a well kept set of the BP board game Oil Strike!

It looks like the long-awaited return to market for GM is only weeks away. The listing could raise up to $20 billion, we’re told by a person with knowledge of the preparations. That would be quite a bit more than the $15 billion that has been talked about. But wait, there’s more!

What does a car company with a solid financing business do to keep the wheels moving? Sources tell us that GM is also in talks with JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo on deals aimed at providing improved access to consumers for auto loans at its U.S. dealerships.

GM Chief Executive Ed Whitacre and other executives have said they favor an IPO as early as this year. Bankers had expected a stock listing to raise between $10 billion to $20 billion by selling part of the U.S. government’s 60.8 percent stake in GM to investors.

Assume for a moment that Citi is successful in raising $3 billion for private equity and hedge funds, and assume for another moment that the U.S. government takes away these businesses away from Citi, as legislators are threatening. What happens next? Why is Citi building a business it may soon have to sell? And why would any investor give money to a hedge fund manager that may have to sell its business?

Investors will not likely care about whether the bank will sell its alternative asset management business. Customers care most about who is investing their money day to day, not which corporate logo is on the stationery. And if Citi has to sell the business, it will get a slightly higher price for a business that has an extra $3 billion under management.

Citi is still walking into a mine field by building a business that lawmakers are explicitly trying to keep banks out of. One thing for sure–if Citigroup is building alternative asset management businesses, nobody can accuse it of being under the thumb of the government, which still owns billions of the bank’s shares.

Lawmakers are blasting Big Oil on Capitol Hill, but most of the execs from Exxon, Conoco, Chevron etc may have more to gain from the slap-down then they stand to lose if you consider the real target of their ire, BP.

For weeks, with its share price scraping the sea bed, BP has been the subject of take-under talk. Every time another politician assigns another zero to the end of the cost of the clean-up, and each call for BP to cut its dividend, puts the British company’s future further into question.

And why wouldn’t BP’s competitors want to see a weakened rival possibly turn up as cheap easy pieces to pick up in forced asset sales?

At least French coutnerpart Total, which was not on the witness stand today, has promised to keep its hands off.

“In a somewhat polite way, the other oil companies are throwing BP under the bus,” Richard Beales of Breakingviews comments. In a less polite sense, they may well be ready with the ambulance as well.

As Wednesdays go, this must be one of the best in a while for activist investor Carl Icahn. He’s getting two board posts at Genzyme, for which he is dropping his proxy battle, and he has charmed the Canadians into approving his tender offer for Lions Gate Entertainment, for which all he had to do was promise to keep the Canadian film division in Canadian hands if he takes control of the Los Angeles studio.

All this is a welcome turn of events for the high profile investor who has suffered through his share of misses in recent years, including his disappointing investments in Blockbuster and, most famously, Yahoo.

Icahn had nominated himself and three allies to Genzyme’s board after a manufacturing crisis lead to shortages of two of the company’s life-saving drugs. Genzyme has agreed to appoint two Icahn representatives — Dr. Steven Burakoff and Dr. Eric Ende — and in return Icahn will withdraw his slate and vote his shares in favor of the company’s nominees. “I think overall this is a positive,” said Michael Obuchowski, chief investment officer at First Empire Asset Management, which owns Genzyme’s shares and oversees nearly $4 billion in assets. “It avoids a continuing confrontation with Icahn and provides more oversight over the direction the company takes.”

On the movie front, Icahn said last week he would launch a proxy battle for control of the board of Lions Gate, after the studio posted a narrower-than-expected, but second consecutive quarterly loss. Icahn said he will put up his own slate of director nominees prior to the company’s annual meeting. Lions Gate has not yet announced a date for the meeting. It may want to stay away from Wednesday when it gets around to choosing one.

You couldn’t accuse former Marsh & McLennan CEO Michael Cherkasky of wandering too far from his knowledge base. Though he may not have been able to shine at Marsh, he seems to have not only found kindred spirits in private equity firm Providence Equity Partners, but he may have gotten them a steal for his old firm, financial intelligence company Kroll.

Six years ago, Marsh bought Kroll for $1.9 billion. Today Altergrity, headed by Cherkasky and backed by Providence Equity Partners, said it would pay only $1.3 billion – cash, mind you – to take the investigative franchise private. Marsh wrote off more than $850 million in goodwill, so analysts note that the insurer could register a profit from the sale. It’s not as if Cherkasky had to come in with some sweep-them-off-their-feet offer. Marsh has had Kroll on the block for at least a month.

Over the years, Kroll has hired plenty of investigators, former police and intelligence officers, and has taken on its fair share of journalists as well. It operates in that colorful space between suits and sleuths. While not an unnatural business for an insurer to own, analysts seem happy with Marsh’s steps to streamline and strip away the non-core asset, so they say it’s a good deal for Marsh to get Kroll off its books.  For Kroll, private equity leadership – particularly as familiar as it feels with Cherkasky at the helm – could be just the kind of management needed to build operations in the shadows.

American International Group CEO Robert Benmosche asked the insurer’s board for time to explore options besides a public offering for its Asian life unit after a $35.5 billion deal to sell it to Prudential fell apart, a source familiar with the matter tells Paritosh Bansal.

Benmosche wanted to explore other options for American International Assurance, including selling parts of the business, after the directors on Monday voted down a sale to Prudential on revised terms, the source said. The British insurer had asked AIG to cut the price to $30.4 billion.

Putting aside for the moment what AIA may actually be worth, AIG’s board and even Uncle Sam can possibly be forgiven for not wanting to appear too desperate to sell. They certainly would have had a harder time setting prices for other assets if Pru was able to knock a sixth off the price just for asking.

Plus, there appears to be surprisingly little appetite in Washington for holding AIG’s feet to the fire to get back the tens of billions of dollars in bailout support that made the U.S. government AIG’s most dominant shareholder and creditor.

A date has yet to be set for the next board meeting on the issue of what to do with AIA, but with congressional elections in November, the longer they wait, the bigger the risk that hawkish politicians begin to circle.

With an outstanding IOU to Uncle Sam of more than $50 billion, AIG hardly seems to be in a position to turn up its nose at a lower bid for AIA from Britain’s Prudential. The message was pretty clear to Pru’s CEO Tidjane Thiam that his shareholders were in little mood to approve a $21 billion rights issue to fund a $35 billion purchase of AIG’s Asian assets. So he came back with a $30 billion offer. No surprises there. He’d be mad not to haggle, particularly given it looks like Pru is the only buyer out there.

Suggestions that AIG would opt for an IPO of the Asian business shouldn’t have been much of a threat to Pru’s bid. Expectations were that AIG would get around half what Pru was offering – after haggling – if it went to market, and that assumed a market with a whole lot more appetite for new issues than the one AIG is now looking at.

So what gives? Does AIG have some mystery buyer waiting in the wings willing to hit its magic price tag? Or has AIG CEO Robert Benmosche been given some secret blessing by the U.S. Treasury to slow down the asset sales and try to rebuild the business? That’s almost harder to believe than the white knight suggestion. This is an election year, and politicians will smell blood if it starts to look like AIG is dragging its heels in paying its bills.