DealZone

British interdealer broker Tullett Prebon confirmed it was in preliminary talks that might lead to an offer. The stock is up over 24 percent, valuing the company at nearly 830 million pounds ($1.2 billion), so investors see some merit in the idea, but an analyst we spoke to questioned whether the potential buyers talked about in a Daily Mail newspaper report are logical buyers.

One of them is Macquarie Group, Australia’s top investment bank. Oriel Securities analyst Keith Baird said Macquarie’s expansion of global investment banking business show it is more interested in arranging deals than being an agent for them. The other potential buyer noted was Bank of China, the country’s largest foreign exchange lender.

Baird thought the only reason BOC would want to get involved with an interdealer broker would be to use its institutional knowledge to set up a similar operation in the People’s Republic. He thought a more likely candidate would be Tullett’s Chief Executive Terry Smith (looking like a buyer above?) with the backing of a private equity investor. Smith currently owns around 4 percent.

“Saab story ends” we wrote on these pages last week. Now it has begun again, after Dutch luxury carmaker Spyker raised a last-minute bid over the weekend. It looks as if there are other options, with General Motors saying it will look into several new expressions of interest for its Swedish unit. That’s only two days after it said it would start an orderly wind-down.

The London Stock Exchange (LSE.L) is buying 60 percent in Turquoise, its rival launched by a group of investment banks with a lot of fanfare two years ago. The centuries-old bourse will merge Turquoise with Baikal, its dark pool platform.

Kraft’s (KFT.N) hostile bid does not reflect Cadbury’s (CBRY.L) value, a significant number of big Cadbury shareholders thinks — that’s what Cadbury Chief Executive Todd Stitzer told my U.S. colleagues on Friday. ”It appears that the stand-alone value of the company has risen in the eyes of shareholders,” he said. Meanwhile, the New York Times writes that Britain is going “into an emotional tailspin” over the prospect of losing Cadbury. If that’s the case, they’re hiding it well — must be the stiff upper lip.