DealZone

Upscale British shoemaker and retailer Jimmy Choo was bought by luxury goods group Labelux from TowerBrook Capital Partners, the companies said.

The companies did not disclose terms of the deal, but two sources familiar with the deal said it was worth about $812 million.

The deal, according to Footwear News, will help Jimmy Choo makes inroads into the Asian market thanks in part to Bally’s strong presence in the area. Labelux purchased Bally’s in 2008 but added that the two brands will operate independently.

DealBook noted the Choo deal is just the latest in recent intense activity in the luxury industry including LVMH’s recent takeover of Bulgari, Prada’s impending Hong Kong IPO and Hermes selling it’s stake in Jean-Paul Gaultier to Puig.

Investors, analysts and pundits took the weekend to take a step back to see what went right and what went wrong with LinkedIn’s IPO.

BHP Billiton, the world’s biggest miner, is making its $130 a share offer for Potash Corp directly to shareholders, bypassing the Canadian company’s board which a day earlier called the bid “grossly inadequate.” *View article

Private equity firm Lone Star is scrapping plans to sell a majority stake in Korea Exchange Bank worth about $4 billion because of weak demand from potential investors, a local paper said. The decision, if confirmed, would be Lone Star’s third failure to sell KEB since buying into the bank in 2003. *View article

It doesn’t always take huge financial backing to start a company. The WSJ found some entrepreneurs who started out with little money but a lot of time and business savvy. *View WSJ article

Rather predictably,  the probe into Goldman Sachs overshadowed the group’s first quarter results on Monday. Somewhat less predictably, Goldman’s rivals have been using the furore to elbow in front of the leading Wall Street bank. As an example, rival investment bankers have been lobbying authorities in China to drop Goldman as an underwriter for the more than $20 billion IPO of state-owned Agricultural Bank of China.

Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ) is preparing to bid for Lone Star’s $4bln controlling stake in Korea Exchange Bank, the nation’s sixth largest lender. The news of the arrival of unexpected contender for the U.S. private equity firm’s stake helped send shares in the bank 3 percent higher.

For more Reuters’ deals news, click here.

In other media:

Google is in talks to buy travel software manufacturer ITA Software Inc, Bloomberg reported. A deal could value ITA, whose programs are used by Orbitz Worldwide and Microsoft, as about $1 billion.

Asia’s sovereign wealth funds may be loaded, but they don’t need long memories to recall the big losses they’ve suffered on seemingly sure-thing investments in Wall Street’s troubled banks. So with reports that Lehman Brothers came up empty in efforts to win funds from top Chinese brokerage CITIC Securities and state-owned Korea Development Bank, it’s anybody’s guess where it will come up with the cash it needs to deal with an expected $4 billion in writedowns before announcing results in September.  

The path most traveled heads further east, to Singapore and the gulf, where investors could be equally, if not more gun-shy given the news flow. A ray of hope could shine from Singapore though. State investment firm Temasek said it was prepared to plunk more money into Western banks. An Singapore sling couldn’t come at a better time. This morning, Citi’s Prashant Bhatia became the latest big bank analyst to warn on Lehman and fellow investment banks Goldman and Morgan Stanley, lowering third quarter estimates for all three, and The Wall Street Journal says the Fed had called Credit Suisse last month to see if it had pulled a credit line from Lehman, acting to prevent a repeat of the cascading speculation that helped sink Bear Stearns.

U.S. private equity investor Lone Star is buying the rump of lender IKB, Germany’s most prominent casualty of the subprime crisis. The sale by state bank KfW closes an embarrassing and costly chapter for Europe’s biggest economy. IKB nearly collapsed a year ago under the weight of $24 billion in investments linked to risky U.S. home loans, making it Europe’s first major victim of the global financial crisis. The government brokered the first of three rescues to avert what the country’s banking watchdog warned could trigger Germany’s biggest financial crisis since the 1930s depression. But as the cost of the rescues spiraled towards 10 billion euros ($14.8 billion), Berlin started looking for a buyer.

In the end, he wasn’t in some sub-Saharan refuge, an Asian island paradise or a secluded European spa … fugitive former hedge fund manager Samuel Israel III (pictured right) was holed up in a mobile home (pictured below). Israel handed himself over to authorities in Massachusetts to start his 20-year prison sentence after having faked his suicide to avoid doing time. Israel, who co-founded Connecticut hedge fund Bayou Group, in 2005 pleaded guilty to a scheme to fabricate returns and cheat investors out of $450 million. He was sentenced in April. Police said his mother convinced him to turn himself over to police. If he was hoping for another shot at fleedom, he can forget about it. “There is not the slightest possibility that I or any other judge would release you at this point,” Judge Michael Ponsor told Israel before turning him over to U.S. Marshals.

Landmark Communications could announce the sale of the Weather Channel to a group made up of NBC Universal, Blackstone and Bain Capital in the next day or two, sources briefed on the matter said. The final price on the cable network, which produces national, regional and local weather-related programs, is expected to be between $3 billion and $3.5 billion, and likely at the higher end of that range, the sources said. The parties have been negotiating directly with Landmark since Time Warner withdrew its bid two weeks ago. There is always a small chance things could fall apart or slow down at the last minute, but absent any such unforeseen problems, the deal should be announced in the next couple days, one of the people said.

BHP Billiton said U.S. antitrust authorities have cleared its unsolicited $170 billion bid for rival miner Rio Tinto. The company’s announcement said the clearance satisfied part of U.S. antitrust law requirements. U.S. law gives antitrust authorities the right to re-open their investigation if new information comes to light before the transaction closes, experts say. However in reality, the United States has now given full clearance to the deal, not that U.S. opposition is a major issue for the mega merger. Problems are more likely to be raised in Asia and Europe.