With the end of the economic meltdown so tantalizingly close, and stock markets pricing in the spring thaw, The Consumerist’s annual Worst Company in America competition is just the tonic DealZone readers need to keep their prized sense of perspective appropriately tickled.

“It’s the bailouts versus the monopolies!” the Website’s news release rings out:

The annual 32-company battle royale has whittled itself down to the “final four”: Bank of America, Comcast, Ticketmaster and AIG. One of these disastrous companies will go on to join Halliburton (2006), RIAA (2007) and Countrywide (2008) as “The Worst Company in America.”

AIG and Ticketmaster face-off May 4th, Bank of America and Comcast face-off May 5th, the victors of those contests meet May 6th, and then the “winner” is announced May 7th.

The competition began with 32 companies separated into four brackets. Companies competed in head-to-head match ups and the winner of each match up was determined by the vote of Consumerist readers. The 32 companies included: AIG, Target, Peanut Corp of America, American Express, Walmart, HP, T-Mobile, Best Buy, Ticketmaster, TWC, Apple, United HealthCare, Verizon, Sprint, Home Depot, Citibank, Comcast, DirecTV, US Airways, Capital One, General Motors, United Airlines, Sears, Chase, eBay/Paypal, GE, Dell, Chrysler, AT&T, Circuit City, Starbucks, and Bank of America.

“AIG and Bank of America paved their way to the final four with exorbitant executive compensation packages, reckless management, and tax payer bailouts. Ticketmaster and Comcast drew the ire of voters because they were viewed as monopolies that consumers were forced to deal with,” said Meghann Marco, Consumerist.com.

Deals of the Day:

* French retail giant Carrefour has signed a preliminary memorandum of intent to buy 75 percent in Russia’s Seventh Continent and will make a final offer on May 15, a newspaper reported. Sources told Reuters last month that Carrefour had provisionally valued its takeover target at $1.25 billion.

* Commodity trader Noble Group raised its offer for Australian miner Gloucester Coal to A$490 million ($361 million), in a bid to scupper Gloucester’s planned deal with rival Whitehaven Coal.

* Sanofi-Aventis announced a 200 million euro ($265 million) plan to convert a factory to biotechnology, highlighting efforts by the world’s fourth largest drugmaker to penetrate the growing sector.

* Finland’s Metsaliitto said it will sell its 49.9-percent stake in state-controlled renewable energy firm Vapo to a consortium for 165 million euros ($218.4 million) to bolster its balance sheet.

* Azrieli Group said it submitted the winning bid to buy a 4.83 percent stake in Bank Leumi from Cerberus Capital Management and Gabriel Capital Corp.

* Zotye Auto, a Chinese maker of sport utility vehicles (SUV), is raising about 720 million yuan ($106 million) by selling a 20 to 30 percent stake to a private equity fund-led consortium, aiming for a Shanghai initial public offering later, sources said.

* Saab Automobile, the Swedish unit of struggling U.S. carmaker General Motors, said it was not in talks with Italian peer Fiat SpA about a takeover.

(PHOTO: Manchester United’s John O’Shea (R) celebrates his goal against Derby County during their English League Cup soccer match at Old Trafford in Manchester, northern England January 20, 2009. Photograph taken on January 20, 2009. REUTERS/Darren Staples)

(From Acquisitions Monthly)

The coming financial services new world order could unleash a wave of mergers and acquisitions as providers look to thrive under a regime of tighter regulation and diminished risk appetite. As such, the IBM Institute for Business Value calls into question some of the ideological shibboleths still held by many senior banking executives.

Whilst banks such as Citigroup, UBS and the UK’s Barclays cling to the notion of universal banking – effectively one stop shops – research by IBM argues that this particular model may not be fit for purpose anymore. The days of soaring profits from what it calls “pockets of opacity” such as over the counter derivatives are over.

“Some of the largest institutions may be required to downsize or dispose of business lines,” says IBM.  It predicts that outperformers will become much more specialist and aligned with their customers’ needs. Many universal banks were found to be more self-serving in outlook. “On average the specialists have seen their revenues grow 30 percent more than the universal banks and enjoy operating margins of 25 percent compared with the 16 percent universal banks command,” says the IBM Institute.

It sees the industry splitting into three segments: The first are utilities providing infrastructure to facilitate capital allocation and relying on economies of scale to drive down costs. The second are those that give advice such as wealth management firms and boutique M&A advisors. The last category, are those geared to investment outperformance such as private equity groups and hedge funds. Barclays for example might inadvertently be contributing to this trend with its disposal of passive fund manager, iShares for 3 billion pounds ($4.3 billion).

Basically the IBM Institute is suggesting there could be more disposals to come from the universal banks as the market forces them to streamline or investors seeking higher returns demand it.

Banks such as Barclays also face growing competition in retail banking with the likes of giant retailer, Tesco, planning their own banks. Their offerings threaten to be much more customer-centric and this will force the traditional banks to rethink their approach and as IBM predicts, possibly to specialise.

Reporting by Justin Pugsley, Acquisitions Monthly

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Deals of the Day:

* German insurer Allianz and U.S. credit card group American Express raised a combined $1.9 billion on Tuesday through the sale of share’s in Chinese banking giant ICBC.

* Japan’s Toshiba said it would set up a joint venture with U.S.’s Amkor Technology and Japan’s Nakaya Microdevices in October to assemble system chips. Toshiba, Japan’s biggest chipmaker, said the outsourcing move would help improve earnings in its battered chip business.

* Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group has agreed to buy Citi’s Japanese retail brokerage and part of its investment banking operations here for more than $5.2 billion, sources said

* Qatar is in talks to buy a stake in Germany’s Porsche and may also invest in other carmakers as the Gulf gas exporter looks to park some of its sovereign wealth abroad, according to media reports.

* German Economy Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg is meeting senior representatives of Magna to discuss a possible investment by the car parts supplier in Opel, a unit of General Motors.

* Consumer goods exporter Li & Fung, which manages supply chains for retailers such as Wal-Mart and Target, expects to sign more outsourcing deals within months as cash-strapped retailers in the United States look to cut costs in the economic downturn.

(PHOTO: Flags fly outside the Citigroup headquarters in New York, November 24, 2008. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid)

Perhaps the best that can be hoped for from the upcoming week of stress test anxiety is that once it is over, a modicum of uncertainty will be gone as well. Sometime today, we should know how heavy the yardstick used in the tests was. The banks either already know or will soon find out whether they passed, and on May 4, expect all kinds of whooping and hollering outside the Deans’ office when the results are officially posted. Of course, there is a pretty good chance that as the banks find out the test results, the news will find a way out, so May 4 may turn out to be somewhat anti-climactic.

What happens next is still a bit vague. There is much talk about officials force feeding more funds to stressed-out banks. And despite the bad press on shotgun marriages — what with NY AG Andrew Cuomo stomping his feet over alleged pressure applied to Ken Lewis for Bank of America to take over Merrill Lynch — financial matchmakers will certainly look at the failures as prime candidates for synergistic harmonization.

But for the optimist, the market truism that the end of uncertainty is always a good thing could come as a welcome spring break for the troubled financial sector.

(PHOTO: A man hits a punching bag depicting a “boss”, as part of a test to measure his stress level, in a Madrid hotel July 3, 2007. Spanish hotel chain NH organized the promotional event which involved the smashing up of one floor of the hotel before its remodeling.  REUTERS/Sergio Perez)

Deals of the day:

* Italian power-grid operator Terna SpA sold a 66 percent stake in its Brazilian unit for 2.33 billion reais ($1.06 billion) to Brazilian power firm Cemig, as it focuses on developing the grid.

* China Huiyuan Juice said it is unaware of the source of news reports that suggested Coco-Cola has resumed discussion with the company.

* Shares in Italian Internet service provider Tiscali SpA were up 10 percent in early trading after MF newspaper said it expected to get a binding offer from British telecoms group Carphone Warehouse for its British assets.

* The Irish government is likely to take further shareholdings in the country’s banks, the Irish Times newspaper quoted a cabinet minister as saying.

Given his bank gobbled up the biggest broker on Wall Street and the biggest mortgage lender in the country, one can be forgiven for thinking Bank of America’s Ken Lewis is talking his book. After all, going on CNBC and sounding confident is his primary role right now, with the days ticking down to the release of first-quarter results on April 20 and the bank’s annual meeting nine days later.

In the network’s lengthy interview, there wasn’t much said about shareholder pressure to unseat him after eight years at the helm of the bank. And, having taken $45 billion of federal bailout money and absorbed Merrill Lynch and Countrywide, he had little incentive to talk about bold measures at this point.

The Wall Street Journal says Lewis is set to sell the bank’s Columbia Management unit and may be looking to unload First Republic Bank, though it is not considering a sale of its stake in hedge fund BlackRock. While he spoke earnestly about repaying taxpayers, repeating his regret at having tapped TARP as heavily as he did, Lewis said it would be several quarters before the bank could do so.

That assumption appears to assume the U.S. economy is showing more than only a false bottom right now. The odd pop in housing prices here and there, and a month of somewhat less shockingly dismal auto sales figures, have convinced Lewis to buy into the recovery theory currently making its way through the markets. “We’re at a point where you’re seeing mixed signals, just small mixed signals, some housing sales a little better than you’d think, or some car sales not being quite as bad as you’d think,” he said. “It signals that you’re getting close to the bottom.”

Deals News:

* Norwegian engineering group Aker Solutions will buy shares in four companies from Aker to strengthen its position in offshore and energy, the two companies said. Aker said Aker Solutions will pay 1.39 billion Norwegian crowns ($205.9 million) for shares in the companies.

* Dow Chemical completed its more than $15 billion acquisition of Rohm and Haas, and immediately sold Morton Salt as part of a plan to scale back debt stemming from the merger.

* Sanofi-Aventis has bought Mexican generic drugmaker Laboratorios Kendrick as part of its strategy to expand in emerging markets, the French drugmaker said.

* Belgian semiconductor specialist Melexis is to buy the vision business of Sensata Technology in a deal expected to close by the end of this month.

* Elpida Memory said it was considering letting Taiwan Memory Co (TMC) take a stake of around 10 percent in the Japanese PC memory maker in a move to cement their new partnership.

(PHOTO: Ken Lewis, Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and President of Bank of America, speaks during the Wall Street Journal Deals and Dealmakers conference, in New York, June 11, 2008.  REUTERS/Chip East)

(Corrected - Bank of America did not purchase Countrywide early this decade)

Now that the nation’s top public servant is wielding The Donald-like powers over chief executives of bailed-out companies, expectations are high that more heads will roll, and Bank of America CEO Kenneth Lewis is looking like the next contestant on a new economic prime-time drama: The Executive.

Rick Wagoner, ousted as General Motors CEO, had spent more than three decades in the company and had been in the driver’s seat for most of the last one. He also presided over the era of the energy-unfriendly Sport Utility Vehicle and is criticized for sticking with trucks far longer than he should have.

Lewis has been Bank of America CEO for about eight years. He bought CountryWide, the biggest lender after the market went crazy for real estate and was ultimately forced to buy Merrill Lynch as the salad days of Wall Street wilted.

By contrast, Citigroup’s Vikram Pandit has been running things for just about long enough to endure the worst of the crisis, and AIG’s Edward Liddy was installed by the government. Perhaps it’s the longevity of characters like Wagoner and Lewis that make them seem so deserving of a presidential pink slip.

Should investors brace for a wave of executive firings? Certainly any chief with enough stripes to remember the good times and who had his hand out for government aid is looking vulnerable.

It is interesting to recall the argument behind AIG’s odious retention bonuses: these are the guys who got their companies into those messes; they should be the best positioned to get them out. If Lewis does get a presidential veto, that argument will be pretty much lost.

Deals of the Day:

* Raven Russia, a property company focused on warehouses in Russia, agreed to acquire property developer Raven Mount Group for 54.9 pence per share, or 60 million pounds, the companies said.

* Spains’ Santander said it had agreed to sell its 32.5 percent stake in Spanish oil company Cepsa to Abu Dhabi fund IPIC at 33 euros per share.

* Hungary’s government said it is injecting fresh funds into FHB, raising its stake in the mortgage bank beyond 40 percent and helping it compete better with foreign rivals in its home market.

* Australian miner OZ Minerals said it received an alternative rescue bid from Minmetals, after Australia last week blocked the Chinese state-owned firm’s $1.8 billion bid on national security grounds

* A Canadian pension fund has offered $930 million to buy Australian investment firm Macquarie Communications Infrastructure Group, sending MCG’s shares up over 58 percent.

(PHOTO: Donald Trump speaks during a news conference at an Aberdeenshire Council inquiry into the plans for his golf course resort in Aberdeen, northeast Scotland June 10, 2008. REUTERS/David Moir)

The dreaded nationalization of Citigroup may have been forestalled but is hardly gone. Weekend reports said the government would take a bigger share of the bank’s common stock, igniting an off-market really in its shares. The Wall Street Journal reported the government would own as much as 40 percent; it said Citi executives would like to hold the number closer to 25 percent. The bank and the state are talking. That’s clearly better than not talking, but hardly seems to justify the big run-up in Citi shares.

The Journal says a scenario on the table has much of the $45 billion in preferred shares the government holds in Citi, which amounts to a 7.8 percent stake in the bank, being converted into common stock. Never mind how hugely dilutive to existing shareholders this would be, and how much more say the government would have in how the bank operates. In any other circumstance (think back to the nationalization of AIG) these are strong sell signals. But so long as the commentary stays focused on forestalling an outright government takeover, Citi shareholders are becoming more encouraged to increase their exposure.

As we did on Friday, DealZone wonders at the process of softening up Americans to the idea of the state taking over the bank; ergo the title of this missive. Sweden, that Keyser Soze of socialism, is considered the modern home of successful bank nationalizations, and given the terror with which U.S. investors approach the idea of even temporary government administration of a major bank, the market’s interpretation of the weekend reports as cause for celebration can perhaps be best understood as hostage mentality.

Other Deals News:

* Germany’s Merck agreed to buy MediCult for 383 million Norwegian crowns ($55.1 million) to boost its fertility treatment business, trumping a rival offer.

* China Development Bank (CDB), a major state-owned bank is looking at various local acquisition targets including Shenzhen Development Bank (SDB), a source familiar with the matter said after SDB’s shares jumped following a local media report.

* Polish builder PBG is ready to discuss with Polimex the sale of its Hydrobudowa unit in return for a large stake in the local rival, a PBG official said.

* Orascom Telecom, the largest Arab telecom firm by subscribers, said it was studying an offer for two of its information technology subsidiaries, to increase focus on its core mobile business.

* Swedish utility Vattenfall has agreed to buy 49 percent of the shares in Dutch peer Nuon and to buy the remaining stake in the coming six years, the two firm said in a joint statement.

* Qatar Telecommunications Co said it would own 65 percent of Indonesia’s PT Indosat after completing a tender offer on Feb. 18 to buy additional shares in the company from the public.

In its latest turnaround plan, General Motors made clear that its money-losing Swedish unit Saab would be independent within a year. Wasting no time, Saab said it would seek protection from creditors and restructure. Better to start with a clean slate.

Saab said it would seek funding from public and private sources through the reorganization, and that GM would provide liquidity.

On another front in the same war, talk of bank nationalization has been dragging down financial markets. Alan Greenspan is talking about it, giving even Republicans an excuse to support this most abhorrently socialist of measures. Even the dire and vague positions of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner seem designed to ease Americans into accepting what would normally be unthinkable to a God-fearing capitalist.

Blame the Swedes. They nationalized their banking sector in 1992, with the cost estimated at 4 percent of gross domestic prodect. The $700 billion U.S. financial industry bailout amounts to 5 percent of GDP — and the Swedes bought a whole lot more meat than the offal-laden packages so far enacted by Congress.

If Americans can stomach the idea of socialized medicine — all ridicule of Canada, the United Kingdom and, well, most of the rest of the world aside — are they also willing to swallow the bitter pill of bank nationalization?

Other Deals News

* State oil monopoly Petrovietnam is in talks with a number of foreign oil companies including Royal Dutch Shell, India’s Essar and South Korea’s SK Energy to upgrade and sell part of the country’s first refinery.

* Spanish information technology group Indra is close to finalizing the acquisition of IT company Telvent, Expansion reported, citing unnamed sources close to the deal. Last month, press reports said private equity firms CVC and Cinven were also interested in Telvent, which is 64 percent owned by Spanish engineering firm Abengoa. A price tag of 1 billion euros had been set by Abengoa for its unit, the report said.

* Taiwan’s China Life will buy the bulk of British insurer Prudential Plc’s business in Taiwan, in the latest pullback by a foreign insurer from the island, the companies said. Prudential will get about 10 percent of China Life in exchange for the bulk of its PCA Life Assurance Co unit, said China Life, which would issue 145.5 million new shares and sell them to Prudential for T$15 per share, valuing the stake Prudential will get at T$2.18 billion ($64 million).

* Private equity firm CVC Capital Partners has hired UBS to sell the specialist care unit of Australian medical imaging company I-Med, banking sources said, in a deal that could fetch about A$200 million ($128 million).

* Philippine investment management firm Q-Tech Alliance will buy Kirin Holdings’ 19.9 percent stake in San Miguel Corp for 63 pesos ($1.30) per share, or a total of about 39.6 billion pesos, a company director said.

* Malaysian water company Puncak Niaga has turned down a bid by the Selangor state government to buy out its water assets, saying the offer lacked clarity. The state government last week offered $444 million to buy the water assets held by Puncak’s units to avert a water tariff hike allowed under its concession agreement from April 1.

* Shire, Britain’s third-biggest drugmaker, is to buy rights to two formulations of Belgian drugmaker UCB’s hyperactivity Equasym for 55 million euros ($69 million), the companies said.

* Nortel Networks, the Canadian phone equipment giant that filed for bankruptcy protection last month, said it agreed to sell parts of its application delivery portfolio to Radware Ltd, pending the results of a court-supervised auction.

* Australia’s Gloucester Coal has offered A$555 million ($358 million) for Whitehaven Coal in an all-share deal to combine the pair’s east Australian coal operations and strengthen their balance sheets.

* The German government gave a cool response to U.S. investor JC Flowers’ suggestion that Berlin pay nearly double Hypo Real Estate’s current share price to buy control of the struggling lender.

Merrill Lynch’s losses shocked even Christopher Flowers, the private equity guru who advised Bank of America on its purchase of the Wall Street firm last fall.

“Yes, I was appalled. Yes, I was shocked,” Flowers said during a panel discussion in New York when asked about what he thought of Merrill’s losses. Merrill lost a record $15.31 billion in the fourth quarter.

Merrill agreed to be bought by BofA in a weekend deal in mid-September as the financial crisis peaked. Lehman Brothers went bankrupt the same weekend, and the U.S. government had subsequently to rescue AIG.

Flowers he got involved in the events beginning Thursday, Sept. 11 when Bank of America was looking at buying Lehman. By Friday he was looking into ways to save AIG, and then helping Bank of America buy Merrill.

“It certainly was an unusual weekend for me,” Flowers said at panel, which also had former AIG CEO Hank Greenberg and Blackstone’s Peter Peterson. “It was a busy weekend.”

The panel, “The Big Fix: Charting a New course for Wall Street,” was moderated by Vanity Fair columnist Michael Wolff.

(Photo: REUTERS/Toby Melville)

Remember early last year and the year before, when the U.S. financial system won huge investments from Asian sovereign wealth funds? Those investments seemed so rich at the time, offering conversions into shares at deep discounts and the kind of interest rates banks had demanded from subprime borrowers. The biggest fear anyone on Wall Street had was some vague sense that foreign ownership of U.S. financial institutions might be somehow un-American or a threat to national security.

Nobody talks about those days much anymore. Merrill Lynch, the recipient of billions of expensive sovereign wealth fund support, was swallowed up by Bank of America. Talk of nationalization swirls around Citigroup, another sovereign wealth fund investment target throughout the stunning collapse in its share price.

Our correspondent George Chen reports China’s $200 billion sovereign wealth fund, China Investment Corp, is shifting to natural resources, fixed income and real estate after taking big haircuts on the U.S. financial sector. The fund, headed by former Vice Finance Minister Lou Jiwei, “has drawn criticism at home over large paper losses on its combined $8.6 billion investments in U.S. private equity giant Blackstone Group and Wall Street bank Morgan Stanley,” Chen says, citing people familiar with the matter.

Sources of sovereign wealth from Singapore, Abu Dhabi and South Korea have all been burned by bad bets on a recovery in the U.S. finance sector.

Lou is in Washington and New York this week and is scheduled to meet top executives of Wall Street firms including Blackstone, Morgan Stanley and Carlyle Group, all of which are keen to attract CIC investments. But Chinese government and financial sources familiar with Lou’s thinking tell Chen that chances of fresh bailout investments are slim, at least for 2009.

Other Deals News

* Thai broker BFIT Securities said it received a merger proposal from a Thai unit of Singapore’s UOB Kay Hian Holdings.

* Swiss drugmaker Roche sold a record $16 billion in debt to help finance a $42 billion hostile offer for Genentech, drawing strong demand from investors hungry for high-quality bonds.

* Spanish construction and energy group Acciona is still in talks with Enel over the sale of its 25 percent stake in Endesa to the Italian utility, an Acciona spokesman said.

* South Korea’s No. 2 beer maker Oriental Brewery has drawn interest from Japan’s Asahi Breweries and Kirin Holdings and local firm Lotte Group, in a deal worth about $700 million, a newspaper reported.

* Malaysian financial group BIMB Holdings is not in talks to merge its sharia banking subsidiary Bank Islam with Maybank, BIMB said.

* Brazil’s central bank said it approved a planned merger between Itau, one of the country’s largest private banks, and smaller rival Unibanco.

(PHOTO: Luo Jiwei, then China’s Vice Minister, Ministry of Finance, poses for a group photo at the 10th Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) finance ministers forum in Phuket, Thailand on September 5, 2003. REUTERS/Adrees Latif)

(Updated with references from Paul Kanjorski’s office)

Lined up to pay their dues, Wall Street CEOs met their congressional inquisitors on Capitol Hill, sparking bouts of righteous indignation peppered with cringe moments worthy of The Office.

Pennsylvania Democrat Paul Kanjorski implored the posterboys for an era of high finance gone bad to “please find a way to return that money before you leave town,” referring to hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer bailout funds that officials believe were poured into unwarranted bonus payments instead of being used to revive the business of lending to America. At least he said please.

The message was clear. Though they may never have been instructed to lend the funds when they got them, that’s what Congress wanted. Bankers need to get back to the business of lending. That’s what they were being bailed out for. Never mind that the business of lending, conducted with adequate credit checks, was not what they were doing before, and that prudence in a period of high inflation would preclude much new lending today.

Kanjorski, chairman of the House subcommittee on capital markets and insurance, is himself the subject of a telling tale of befuddlement making its way around the Internet. In an interview on C-Span he said money market investors pulled $550 billion from their accounts, prompting the Fed to step in on Sept 15 and stop the panic by closing money market accounts. His estimation was that “$5.5 trillion would have been drawn out of the money market system of the U.S., would have collapsed the entire economy of the U.S., and within 24 hours the world economy would have collapsed.”

It looks increasingly like he didn’t have all his facts in presentable, working order. Felix Salmon of Portfolio.com says he can’t find any reporting of money market funds being closed by the government, and neither can we. Andrew Leonard at Slate.com also questions the numbers. Kajorski’s office pointed us to a September New York Post article citing traders as saying money markets were pushed to the wall with $500 billion in sell orders, about a fifth of the entire market, and comments the congressman made at a hearing with then Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, apparently referencing this report.

Keeping in mind that Paulson was just one of a long list of Goldman Sachs grads to become a top policy maker it’s not terribly surprising that neither the rocket scientists of Wall Street nor angry congressional committees seem well suited to the job of restoring confidence in the financial sector.

Other Deals News:

* Chinese state-owned aluminum group Chinalco will invest $19.5 billion in miner Rio Tinto in a deal that will secure resource supplies for China and help cut Rio’s debts, but also raise regulatory scrutiny.

* Rio Tinto Ltd/Plc will sell nearly half its stake in the world’s biggest copper mine, nearly a third of its share in a major bauxite mine and sizeable stakes in key operations in Australia, Indonesia and the Americas in a $12.3 billion asset deal announced on Thursday.

* Spanish competition authority CNC has approved Gas Natural’s 16.7 billion euro ($21.58 billion) bid for Union Fenosa with conditions, a spokeswoman for the regulator said on Thursday.

* General Motors has been in talks with China’s SAIC Motor about the possible sale of a share of GM’s stake in their joint venture or other assets as the U.S. automaker races to raise cash, two sources familiar with the discussions said.

* Japanese video games maker Square Enix has agreed to buy the British firm behind titles such as “Tomb Raider” and “Championship Manager” for 84.3 million pounds ($120.8 million) to extend its reach in Europe.

* Satyam Computer Services Ltd’s board expects to outline the bidding process for a possible sale of the fraud-hit firm in the next 10 days time, Chairman Kiran Karnik said on Thursday.

* Thailand’s Bank of Ayudhya (BAY) said on Thursday it was in talks with financial institutions to buy more retail banking businesses following last week’s acquisitions from AIG.

* German retail and tourism group Arcandor is not in talks with Wal-Mart, the world’s biggest retailer, Thomas Middelhoff said on Thursday, pouring cold water on earlier market talk.

(PHOTO: Combination photograph of Wall Street bank executives testifying before House Financial Services Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, February 11, 2009. Top row (L-R), are: Bank of New York’s Robert Kelly, JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, Goldman Sachs’ Lloyd Blankfein and Wells Fargo’s John Stumpf. Bottom row (L-R), are: CitiGroup’s Vikram Pandit, Morgan Stanley’s John Mack, Bank of America’s Ken Lewis and State Street’s Ronald Logue.  REUTERS/Larry Downing)