There’s a big war brewing over single-serve coffee brand Diedrich Coffee Inc.   

Green Mountain Coffee Roasters Inc on Tuesday raised its bid for Diedrich to $265 million, or $32 a share in cash, to challenge a sweetened offer from Peet’s Coffee & Tea Inc on Monday. Peet’s cash-and-stock offer is valued at $30.41 per share.
    
Diedrich, which makes and sells K-Cup refills for Green Mountain Coffee’s single-cup Keurig brewer system, said its board is “continuing to analyze the two offers” to determine whether Green Mountain’s offer “continues to be a superior proposal.”
    
Peet’s, of course, said it thinks its cash-and-stock proposal is superior “given the greater certainty of an faster closing and the potential upside for Diedrich’s shareholders through the Peet’s stock component.” It has until Friday to make a revised offer.
 
Meanwhile, Green Mountain said its all-cash offer is better than Peet’s because Peet’s proposal is subject to market fluctuations in its stock price. 

Earlier this month, Peet’s had agreed to buy Diedrich for $26 per share, in a bid to cash in on Diedrich’s status as a licensee of Green Mountain’s fast-growing single-cup coffee brewing systems. Green Mountain emerged as an interloper with a competing offer.

“Peet’s does have a sense of urgency to enter the fast-growing single cup market, and Diedrich probably is its only reasonable opportunity,” Anton Brenner of Roth Capital Partners said.

With media titans GE and Vivendi still negotiating a deal to bring cable operator Comcast into a mega-media joint venture, a management move at DirecTV is giving dealwatchers a fresh programming alternative.

Yinka Adegoke and Sinead Carew report the appointment of PepsiCo veteran Michael White (pictured below), who has no experience in pay TV, as DirecTV CEO is being read as a sign the company’s parent, Liberty Media, just wants a baby-sitter until its sells the operation in the next couple of years.

Telecom leaders Verizon and AT&T approached Liberty earlier this year, they report. Both have cross-marketing deals with DirecTV and would leapfrog the rest of the market with the addition of DirecTV’s subscriber base. But fears of insurmountable regulatory resistance put those talks on ice.

Liberty Media shareholders are set to vote this morning on a plan to split DirecTV from Liberty Entertainment — a move that Wall Street believes could pave the way for a telephone company to put in a bid for DirecTV, leading to a similar bid for smaller rival Dish Network.

If Comcast gets its content pipeline connected to NBC Universal, the pressure on the telcos to boost subscribers could get them to test the regulatory waters again.

The defining deals of the week, Kraft’s now officially hostile bid for Cadbury and a deal to sell a majority stake in NBC Universal to Comcast, hinge on decisions of Europe Inc, so they could well drag on many more weeks.

This morning, Kraft formally bid for Cadbury with the same offer mooted two months ago, before today’s put-up-or-shut-up deadline. Cadbury has already said no to these terms, and can be expected to do so again. But the sinking expectations that Kraft might pay more, and the lack of any other buyers coming forward, don’t help to make the case for a successful hold out by Cadbury executives.

Over the weekend we learned that GE and Comcast agreed on a valuation of around $30 billion for a joint venture between NBC Universal and Comcast, ironing out what has been a key obstacle in talks so far. But French media conglomerate Vivendi, which owns 20 percent of NBC Universal, has not yet agreed to a deal, a source said.

So far as NBC is concerned, Vivendi is so far tres mum. Every year between mid-November and mid-December, Vivendi has to decide whether to exercise its option to sell its NBC Universal stake. Vivendi is believed to be eager to dispose of it, but nobody knows what they want for it.

With talk about a multibillion-dollar deal to sell NBC Universal to Comcast burbling away, General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt popped the top on a $250 million venture fund designed to buy stakes in small healthcare technology companies.

“What we’re trying to do is embrace the venture community, try and do a series of early-stage and later-stage type investments,” Immelt said in an interview. “We don’t do everything inside our four walls.”

Competing venture capitalists might consider Immelt’s embrace more of a bear hug. GE is taking a similar approach to the energy industry. It has a stake in A123 Systems, the battery maker that was one of the best-received initial public offerings of the year. Scott Malone, our reporter who interviewed Immelt, notes that taking stakes in smaller companies rather than buying them outright gives GE more flexibility. It gains exposure to a wider array of technologies, any one of which could take off.

“GE is in the midst of a $6 billion drive to revamp its healthcare arm, called ‘Healthymagination,’ that includes rolling out products intended to help hospitals and other health providers cut costs and making investments to encourage the adoption of electronic medical records,” Malone reports.

Might be just cosmetic, but a new name would be a good place to start.

Speaking in New Delhi, General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt said “Discussions are ongoing whether it is an IPO or another partnership,” in response to a question on whether GE was talking to Comcast to sell a stake in the fourth-placed TV network and movie studio. With Vivendi possibly just a couple weeks away from unloading its 20 percent stake in the NBC venture, and all the talk this week about Comcast gathering coins to add the content trove to its cable mix, it might seem as if Immelt is trying to conjure something like a rabbit from a hat – or a peacock from a beret.

GE and Comcast are discussing a deal under which the largest U.S. cable firm would take control of 51 percent of NBC Universal with GE, which has the right of first refusal to pick up Vivendi’s stake if the French company exercises its annual option to sell, taking the rest. “The capital markets have definitely improved,” Immelt said. There is reason to see stability and some optimism for the future,” he said.

Set aside for a moment that the sickly advertising market that NBC already faces. The market for IPOs is picking up nicely right now, but is still in an early stage of recovery, making do with a ragtag bunch of real estate investment trusts and Chinese new-market plays. What effect do you think a big media play splashing into that pool would have on investor demand for new issues?

If you needed a sign that banks are becoming more confident on the finance biz, take a look at what analysts are saying about General Electric this morning. The clouds that have hung over the industrial conglomerate’s finance arm through the financial crisis, are starting to break up, say Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank. GE’s stock put on 4 percent on the comments before the market opened.

With support seen waning for regulatory reforms that would require such GE to dump its finance arm, Goldman boosted the bank’s rating on the GE stock to a “buy” from “neutral”. Deutsche was also upbeat. Both noted that allowing GE to keep the business would give it more strategic flexibility and Goldman had estimated that a forced break-up could cost GE equity holders $40 billion.

GE Capital is the biggest drag on the company, which is trying to wind the unit back to represent no more than 30 percent of earnings, down from half before the crisis. There is little doubt that government intervention elsewhere has been bitter medicine, even if it was seen as necessary to sustaining the financial system. Signs that politicians are releasing their supportive stranglehold on the sector, such as allowing TARP paybacks, are likely to be pointed to as signs of a broader recovery.

U.S. Securities regulators on Thursday sued a well-connected Kuwaiti financier, saying he reaped millions in suspicious profits after false takeover reports briefly sent shares of Harman International Industries soaring this week.

Reuters reporter Ransdell Pierson was in the office working the Sunday shift when he received a fax with the purported takeover offer.  Unable to verify the authenticity of the fax, Reuters did not publish the story.  Here is Ransdell’s first person account of what happened, and a copy of the fax. Would you have questioned its veracity?

Ransdell Pierson:

I was scouring newspapers on a Sunday shift in the Reuters New York bureau and waiting for news about distressed lender CIT Group, when the phone finally rang and broke my reverie. “Newsroom,” I said, and the caller replied, “Your Jeddah bureau is closed today. Can I send you a fax?” The male caller, who I imagined to be a middle-aged office aide frustrated by the thankless chore of delivering his fax, said it was a press release about a deal. Something about one company buying another for about $3 billion.
“If it’s such a big transaction, shouldn’t this news be coming over the PRNewswire or BusinessWire?” I asked him. He explained that it was the weekend, so faxing a press release was the best route.
I gave him a fax number and he called back, irritated the document hadn’t gone through. I gave him another fax number and he soon called back again, more irritated than before. So I gave him the number of a third Reuters fax machine, but told him that it needed to include contact information for all the parties. “Otherwise, we can’t authenticate it.” “OK, you’ll have it,” he replied.

But when the single-sheet document arrived seconds later, it was bereft of any contact info.
Topped by a legitimate-looking APG logo [standing for Arabian Peninsula Group] , it described an offer by the group to buy U.S. stereo equipment maker Harman International Industries. It was plausibly well written, so I did not dismiss it out of hand. But I was skeptical.

Finding no references to the Arabian group in the Reuters databases or Google, and unable to reach any Harman officials for verification, I was glad I hadn’t sent any headlines out about the “deal” on the Reuters wire.

I followed up by calling my editor at home and telling him about the calls, and the fax. He said the 100 percent premium for Harman, in this economy, seemed outlandish. “I’m sure it’s a hoax.”
Even so, the last thing I did that night, after going home, was to do one last Google search — to see if any other news organizations had carried the “news.” The headline from the press release did appear on one or two websites, but not on any major news organizations. I slept well.

Energy M&A has heated up over the past few weeks, with two large deals possibly on the horizon: the sale of Repsol’s Argentine unit YPF as well as Kosmos Energy’s stake in the Jubilee oil field in Ghana.

If thise deals would happen, it would follow Suncor Energy’s $20 billion takeover of rival Petro Canada, announced earlier this year.

So is M&A in the oil sector heating up? Maybe, but insiders warn that the fluctuations in oil and gas prices could slow the flow of deals.

Historically,  crude oil has tended to trade between 9 to 11 times natural gas prices.  But with crude at around $60 a barrel and natural gas at around $3.35 per million british thermal units, that ratio is currently 18 times natural gas prices.

That suggests gas prices will go up or crude prices will go down. If oil prices drop, then assets that on the market could be pulled, and the M&A market could cool fast.

General Electric Co Chief Executive Jeff Immelt went to Michigan, the bleeding heart of the U.S. industrial heartland, on Friday to call for a resurgence in American manufacturing.
But even as he warned against relying too heavily on the financial industry to drive economic growth, he subtly set up a defense of the largest U.S. conglomerate’s hefty finance arm.

Analysts and investors are worried that the Obama administration’s proposed overhaul of U.S. financial regulations could force GE to spin off GE Capital, which has businesses ranging from leasing jet planes to investing in commercial real estate.

“We also need a financial system that is built around helping industrial companies to succeed,” Immelt told the Detroit Economic Club. “GE is an important part of this financial services approach. We plan to focus GE Capital on financing small- and medium-sized customers in industries that we know the best.”

He said that after first contending that the U.S. had come to rely too much on Wall Street wizardry and consumers who spend more than they earn to drive prosperity. Disparities in pay reflect that imbalance, he said.

“You know something is wrong when a mortgage broker is pulling down $5 million a year while a Ph.D. chemist is earning $100,000,” Immelt said.

Immelt did not directly address the proposal on Thursday. But earlier this week, he told GE employees that the largest U.S. conglomerate would fight any effort to force it to separate GE Capital from its industrial core.

Several analysts this week warned that the administration’s current proposal, which would prevent large financial institutions from having nonfinancial operations, would likely require such a separation. However, they pointed out that even the current proposal — which would be subject to negotiation in Congress — allows a five-year grace period.

“The government is unlikely to do anything to cause major disruptions to a huge company like GE until the market recovers significantly, especially since GE has not been blamed for any problems in the financial system,” wrote BernsteinResearch analyst Steven Winoker, in a note to clients.

“Be kind in your article. I read this morning I wasn’t going to get the deal across,” said Agrium CEO Mike Wilson, referring to an article in Canada’s Globe and Mail about his company’s hostile bid for rival fertilizer maker CF Industries. “What the hell is that?”

Speaking on the sidelines of a BMO Capital Management agriculture, protein & fertilizer conference,  Wilson said he was frustrated by CF’s unwillingness to discuss his company’s bid, but “frustration won’t make us go away.”

Agrium bumped its cash-and-stock bid for CF to around $85 a share on Monday, increasing its previous bid more than 6 percent.

“At $85, I can’t believe (CF CEO Steve WIlson is) not going to come to us and say let’s talk,” Agrium’s Wilson said. “I’d be amazed.”