DealZone

BP is looking to sell assets to help pay for the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. A source says BP is in talks with U.S. oil and gas company Apache Corp. The Sunday Times reported that the talks involved $12 billion in assets. View article

Aon, the world’s largest insurance brokerage, said it will acquire human-resource service company Hewitt Associates for about $4.9 billion in cash and stock to beef up its consulting business. The Aon-Hewitt deal is the second major deal in the consultancy space in a year. View article

If you are feeling bullish, then you’re in agreement Warren Buffett, Ken Fisher, Leon Cooperman and John Paulson. The WSJ takes a look at what these four market heavyweights are buying. View WSJ article

Turns out Carl Icahn’s son, Brett Icahn, has played a large role in the hostile takeover attempt for Lions Gate Entertainment. View WSJ article More coverage

Need cash? Check out this early-stage tech investor ecosystem graphic, with email addresses of those who have the cash. View peHUB article

At the Private Equity and Hedge Funds Summit, Primus co-CEO Robert Morse tells Reuters the opportunities in real estate in the U.S. are extraordinary. The $1.2 billion financial investment firm is now setting its sights on property owned by distressed sellers in the United States.

Here is a selection of the best stories from today’s summit:
BC Partners boss sees mini-bubble brewing
CQS raises $750 million for convertibles
BC Partners to court sovereign fund investors
Toscafund says UK stocks’ low value “absurd”

From the Web:

Buffett Casts a Wary Eye on Bankers (NYT)
“”Don’t ask the barber whether you need a haircut.” That little nugget was buried in Warren E. Buffett’s annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders published over the weekend.” – NYT

This Year’s Huge (So Far) M&A Deals And The Lawyers Masterminding Them (Business Insider)
A slide show of the big deals and the lawyers behind them.

While Cadbury shares saw some life on hopes for a rival bid from Hershey — boosted by reporting from the FT that a rival offer was further along than much of the market had assumed — naysaying analysts and pundits have been quick to point out that the financials of a Hershey bid are hard to stomach.

Hershey is only half the size of Cadbury, and a big share issue would dilute the stake of the controlling Hershey Trust, which has been every bit as crucial to defining the company as the kiss. The FT report says Hershey is working on a private equity element with none other than Byron Trott, Warren Buffett’s banker of choice. The idea that Buffett, who is Kraft’s biggest shareholder, could play both sides of a bidding war is, if not new, certainly intriguing, particularly given his apparent distaste for Kraft selling its own shares to keep its bid attractive.

And while Cadbury has repeatedly denied it is looking for a white knight, a deal that would leave its management in place, perhaps in exchange for keeping the Hershey Trust intact, could be attractive enough to consider breaking off a piece of Cadbury to give to a private equity investor to chew on … its gum business, for example.

Warren Buffett may have thrown a monkey wrench into Kraft’s bid for Cadbury — not with his ‘no’ vote on Kraft’s plan to issue 370 million shares to help buy the British chocolate company, but with his scathing comments on Kraft’s board for a deal he has long regarded with skepticism. Buffett previously said Kraft’s stock was an “expensive currency” for funding the deal, a position he repeated on Tuesday.

Kraft’s proposed share issue would give it a “blank check,” allowing it to change its offer for Cadbury, Buffett’s insurance and investment company Berkshire Hathaway said in a statement. “And we worry very much that, indeed, there will be an additional change from the revision announced this morning.”

The statement came hard on the heels of a slight sweetening by Kraft of its $16.4 billion offer for Cadbury. The overall figure is the same, but the cash portion is a bit bigger. Perhaps more telling, it also followed a statement from Nestle shooting down speculation that the world’s biggest food group had any interest in getting involved in the Cadbury deal.

The Treasury, as major shareholder of such credit boom casualties as Citigroup and General Motors, showed with its $3.8 billion infusion into GMAC that it can still be counted on to safeguard the financial system from systemic collapse. The auto-loan company, which had dutifully spread its wings into mortgages in the housing boom, wound up becoming a bank to qualify for TARP bailout funds a year ago – the day after Christmas 2008, to be precise. How could Treasury say no?

Now taxpayers are plonking another $3.8 billion into GMAC to help cover mortgage losses. That gives us another majority shareholding in a company that could not have survived to pay its bills, workers and its executives without aid. No, it’s not much in terms of the government’s balance sheet. But it should rankle in Congress when lawmakers come back from holiday.

Not far behind the brouhaha over universal health care lays the still smoldering debate over “too big to fail”. Is it naïve to note that the timing of GMAC’s new lifeline came when legislators were safely tucked away at home? Arguing that AIG was too big to fail, with its myriad confusing and distracting derivative contracts, and that GM was too big to fail, with its strategic position just behind the aorta of the American manufacturing heartland, or even that Citigroup, with its corner office (sans fireplace) in the U.S. superbanking community can somehow be extended to GMAC might seem farfetched to fiscal hawks.

Warren Buffett knows sweets. His Berkshire Hathaway is the largest shareholder in Kraft Foods, which made an unsolicited — and rebuffed — $16 billion bid for Cadbury. The Wall Street Journal reported that the trust that holds voting control of Hershey has hired Buffett’s favorite banker, Byron Trott, as it also weighs whether to pursue the British chocolate maker.

Trott, a former Goldman Sachs banker who runs his own firm now, is known for his expertise in candy as well as in advising family- and trust-owned companies. He convinced Buffett to pay $6.5 billion to help finance Mars in its $23 billion takeover of Wrigley last year.

Paritosh Bansal and Jessica Hall report that while Trott’s latest engagement may not have anything to do with Buffett, he may end up helping the billionaire investor. Sources previously told Reuters Hershey is unlikely to make a bid on its own for all of Cadbury. But Hershey may want to pick up pieces of Cadbury, which makes Dairy Milk chocolate, Halls cough drops and Trident gum. This could bode well for Buffett, some investors said.

Some in the financial industry apparently smell opportunity in the latest round of mergers and blood-letting among top banks.

Referring to the Wells Fargo takeover of Wachovia as the WWF and placing Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis atop a bucking Merrill Lynch bull are just a couple of the attention-getting devices financial sector recruiting firm RJ & Makay uses in its latest promotional You Tube video.

Branching out from a previous video aimed at Merrill Lynch brokers, the new “Billion Dollar Video” (the company claims assets from advisers brought to them via these viral recruiting tools represent billions of dollars) targets all financial advisers but specifically appeals to those currently at Merrill Lynch and Wachovia.