DealZone

After four months of rhetoric, tense talks, phantom bids and late-night humor (Kraft and Cadbury agreed to a deal. Finally, mac and cheese creme eggs!), the deal is done. Here are some different takes on the deal.

The dealmakers:

Kraft Deal Cements Wasserstein Legacy, Fees for Lazard (Bloomberg) Kraft banker to become UK’s top takeover arbiter (Reuters) Kraft CEO satisfied with sweetened Cadbury deal (Reuters)

National pride:

Kraft bid hurts patriotic pride of Cadbury workers and video (Reuters) For Britain, Cadbury Takeover Isn’t Easy to Swallow (NYT)

Who won?

Kraft-Cadbury — a “Win-Win” Deal? (WSJ)

The retoric:

Cadbury Buries the Hatchet (WSJ)

Irene Rosenfeld kudos:

Kraft’s Rosenfeld snags Cadbury (TheDeal.com)

Just the facts:

Kraft/Cadbury statistics and history (Reuters) Timeline: Kraft agrees Cadbury deal after 4-month fight (Reuters)

Live Nation, Ticketmaster deal gets green light in UK

Britain’s Competition Commission did an about-face last night, giving its blessing to the proposed merger of live music giants Live Nation and Ticketmaster. What’s nearly as surprising as the reversal is the starkly negative reasoning behind the decision.

UK regulators had said in October they was concerned about the move to combine the world’s largest concert promoter with the leading ticketing group, saying fans could wind up paying more to see their favorite artists. Certainly artists, fans and politicians have been lined up against the deal, so the backbone to resist the merger seemed solid enough.

But on second thought, the Commission said the new entity would not have the incentive to hurt rivals, in particularly an existing partner of Live Nation’s. “We found that, in most of these cases, the merged entity would suffer significant and immediate losses, with very uncertain prospects for long-term gain … Therefore, we concluded that it was unlikely that the merged entity would harm other ticketing agencies, promoters and venues in these ways.”

If you see Sid, tell him. Tell him his help will be needed to swallow more UK equity than at any time since the flood of privatisations in the 1980s.

That’s the clear message from UK Financial Investments, the body that holds stakes in Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds Banking Group and nationalised banks. Those stakes are likely to be worth about 80 billion pounds.

“We will need to innovate, be imaginative in our approach and use the full range of sales methods available to us,” John Crompton, head of market investments at UKFI, says in a speech at Reuters offices in London.

As anti-capitalists, environmentalists, anti-war campaigners and others protested in the City of London to mark what they dubbed “Financial Fools’ Day”, the lobby group for Britain’s much-maligned private equity industry spied an opportunity to contrast the mayhem with their own activities.

It’s hard to tell just how far the BVCA‘s metaphorical tongue was in its cheek with this OTT press release, prompted by the protests and the “pre-pack sale” of the owner to the rights of some British kids’ TV characters, including He-Man and Postman Pat (pictured).

Still they insisted it was not an April fool, even as they billed private equity a possible “He-Man of the recession”. With this kind of deft “brand repositioning”, surely it won’t be long before Britons warm to the buyout houses. Full release in all its glory below: