Christmas may have come a day early for Merrill Lynch. The mortgage-debt-wracked investment bank is selling up to $6.2 billion worth of discounted new stock to Singapore’s Temasek Holdings and Davis Selected Advisers. The deal makes Merrill the latest in a growing number of Wall Street firms to receive cash from sovereign wealth funds — following Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and UBS.

Merrill is also selling most of its Chicago-based capital lending business to General Electric’s commercial finance. GE Capital, which dominates the middle-market financing space, is set to buy Merrill Lynch Capital’s corporate finance, equipment finance, franchise, energy and healthcare finance units, which Merrill’s chief executive John Thain said would allow it to redeploy about $1.3 billion of capital. Merrill’s commercial real estate finance unit is not part of the transaction, which will add more than $10 billion in assets and $5 billion in commitments to GE Capital Commercial Finance’s base of $260 billion.  
    
Capgemini shares got a boost from a report that Indian software exporter Wipro would bid for the French computer consultancy firm. The Hindustan Times said Wipro was expected to bid for Capgemini by the end of January, citing unnamed sources. Shares in London-based media group Emap jumped briefly on speculative interest as some investors took the view that a counter-bidder may pitch for the company’s specialist publishing and conferences assets. In a surprise move on Friday, Emap said it had agreed to sell its specialist magazines and events business to privately owned Guardian Media Group and private equity firm Apax Partners for around 1 billion pounds ($1.98 billion). On Monday, the two groups said they had each bought 20.97 million Emap shares on Friday for a combined 19.4 percent stake.