British publisher Informa is in talks to buy its German rival Springer Science and Business Media from private equity firms Candover and Cinven, the FT says.

Informa initiated talks with Springer three weeks ago and is considering an all cash bid, according to its story, but private equity firms including Apax and EQT are still looking at the business.

For the latest deals news from Reuters, click here.

And here are the top stories from the newspapers (some external links may require subscription):

French fashion group PPR is planning to sell its retail businesses, including books and music chain FNAC and discount furniture business Conforama, as soon as it can, chief executive Francois-Henri Pinault told the WSJ.

Insurance broker Marsh & McLennan is closing in on a deal for HSBC Insurance Brokers, the UK’s ninth largest broker, valued at 150 to 200 million pounds, the Daily  Telegraph says.

More consolidation may be coming to the world of private equity lenders. Debt-laden Allied Capital solved its long-standing problems last week when it sold itself to Ares Capital. Rival American Capital, once an S&P 500 component but now struggling for survival, could be the next takeover target.

But some investors wonder if Allied got a raw deal. Ares paid $3.47 a share in stock for a company that had a book value of $7.49 in June. One law firm has already launched a “shareholder investigation“. Similarly, American Capital’s shares trade below $3, compared with a book value of $8.76 at the end of June.

Ares Capital is one of the rare healthy players in the field. It has a strong balance sheet and minimal liquidity concerns, and it has managed to pay a dividend throughout the worst U.S. recession since the Great Depression. For an Allied shareholder used to a continuous flow of bad news, swapping that stake for an investment in a healthy company must seem like a good move.

Like Allied, American Capital has suffered as the recession reduced the value of the companies it invested in. As a result, it’s gotten harder to sell them except at distressed prices. That value reduction is a big blow for a cash-starved company that has already defaulted on $2.3 billion of debt.

Both American Capital and Allied have sold portfolio companies at heavy discounts to their purchase prices. Now with equity markets sharply up from their doomsday-scenario lows in March, American Capital is on an aggressive selling spree. Recently it sold components distributor Imperial Supplies to W.W. Grainger and life sciences equipment maker Axygen BioScience to Corning.

Unfortunately for American Capital, it may not have all that many more companies in its portfolio to sell at decent prices. Its best bet may be to find a healthy suitor for itself so it can return some capital to shareholders before it’s too late.

– Anurag Kotoky

Carlyle –at one time famous for having former presidents and prime ministers on its payroll– is taking a step to attract more women and minorities into the male-dominated world of private equity.

“I’d say that private equity firms have been behind investment banks and law firms (in such hiring),” David Rubenstein, co-founder of Carlyle told Reuters.

“The industry… probably has fewer women partners and probably fewer minority partners than we probably should have.”

D.C.-based Carlyle is now looking to encourage women and minorities to break the glass ceiling to gain high positions in the firm. Carlyle, together with non-profit organization The Robert Toigo Foundation, said on Thursday they’re setting up a MBA fellowship which will include time spent working at Carlyle, its portfolio companies and with some of the firms’ investors.

Rubenstein said that hopefully, some will afterward want to work permanently at Carlyle or other private equity firms.

“We hope this will lead to our recruiting  some very talented minority MBAs,” he said. ”In our particular case, we do have the most senior women in the buyout world who are partners here, and we have a number of senior minority black partners, but we could do better,” he said.

Carlyle said it has pledged $1 million over four years to support the effort. 

The firms are inviting second-year minority MBA students to apply at www.toigofoundation.org and said in a press release they’re expecting strong competition.

“The foundation we’re affiliating with has a 30 year history of identifying very talented MBA students and finding jobs for them on Wall Street,” he said. “Well, we want to make sure they come to private equity firms, not just other kinds of Wall Street firms.

Highlights from the Thomson Reuters Investment Banking Scorecard:

Corporate M&A loses out …

Xstrata abandoned its $42.5 billon merger with Anglo American on Oct. 15, making it the largest withdrawn transaction this year. Withdrawn M&A has reached $205 billon so far in 2009.

The banks advising both parties would have earned an estimated $150.7 millon if the transaction had gone through. Deutsche, Lazard and UBS each lose a place in the global M&A rankings, falling to sixth, eighth and ninth, respectively, due to the failure. In Europe, Goldman Sachs loses the top spot, falling to third, while Normura drops out of the top 25 from 12th spot.

Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse take first and second position in the year to date European rankings.

… but private equity scores a hit:

CVC Capital Partners agreed to acquire the Central European operations of Anheuser-Busch Inbev for $3 billion, in a leveraged buyout transaction on Oct. 15.

This is the second largest European private equity backed M&A deal year-to-date, bringing the total value of private equity activity to $23 billion so far this year.

Time to reap some green shoots? Private equity firm Blackstone plans to list up to eight of its portfolio companies, aiming to make more hay from improved stock markets. Rival Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co’s Dollar General filed for an initial public offering of up to $750 million in August, and KKR is considering others, sources previously told Reuters.

Blackstone is positioning one company — hospital staffing firm Team Health — for an IPO and evaluating the potential for seven others, a source tells us, citing a letter sent from Blackstone to investors. The letter also says Blackstone is in the process of selling five companies outright, which it sees generating aggregate proceeds of $2.8 billion.

One of the exits is Kosmos Energy’s Ghanaian oil interests, the source who has the letter said. Sources previously told Reuters that Exxon Mobil had agreed to buy Kosmos Energy’s stake in the Jubilee field. Kosmos is backed by Blackstone and Warburg Pincus.

Two very different deals announced Wednesday show that financing markets are starting to support larger private equity transactions again.

Still, large numbers of banks were involved in each deal and both involved a significant amount of the private equity firms’ own equity.

“It suggests there’s a little bit of thawing,” said Steven Kaplan, a professor of finance at the University of Chicago. “It suggests there will be a normal world at some point and they are both the kind of deals you’d expect to see in this environment — you don’t expect public-to-publics in this market.”

Blackstone’s acquisition of AB InBev’s theme parks involves up to $1 billion of equity in the deal, which is around 40 percent of the overall price. The rest is coming from senior secured debt, mezzanine financing and an undrawn revolver. Senior credit facilities are being provided by a line of banks — BofA Merrill Lynch, Barclays Capital, Deutsche Bank Securities, Goldman Sachs Loan Partners and Mizuho Corporate Bank.

Clayton Dubilier & Rice Inc’s $477 million deal to take a stake in cleaning company JohnsonDiversey and undertake a $2.6 billion recapitalization was backed by an even longer list of banks: eleven in total are willing to participate in the financing, CD&R said.

The large number of banks involved “indicates that the lending market is still not robust so you need a bunch of lenders to get one of this size,” said Kaplan. Lenders will prefer to be diversified, he added.

Equity levels in deals are also higher than during the boom years. The equity check put in by Blackstone for the theme park deal is higher than what firms might have put in during 2005-07. During those frothy years, a more usual number was around 30 percent, whereas this year, some deals by private equity firms have even involved 100 percent equity.

“Equity percentages when the debt market is strong tend to be in the 30 percent range — or 25 percent if it is really high — and when the bank markets are off, which they are now… you’re at 35 or 40 percent, which is where you are today,” said Kaplan.

Still, there’s a long way to go between here and the late 1980s buyout wave.

“The big difference between the late ’80s and the recent wave is that (then), the median deal was 90 percent debt and 10 percent equity — it was insane,” said Kaplan. “The deals done in this last wave were much safer.”

Blackstone Group’s plan to buy Anheuser-Busch InBev’s U.S. theme parks for up to $2.7 billion may turn out to be a brilliant expansion into the recession-squelched entertainment industry. But it could also prove to be a roller coaster in terms of value if Americans don’t rediscover fun as part of the economic recovery.

For its part, AB InBev at least has a product that can sell equally well when people are depressed. The deal helps to satisfy its goal of raising $7 billion from divestments.

The theme park deal is one of the largest private equity transactions this year. It will add Busch Entertainment Corp’s 10 parks — including three SeaWorlds and two Busch Gardens — to Blackstone’s existing fun stable housing Madame Tussauds wax museums, Legoland and the London Eye Ferris wheel. mumblings about anti-trust issues, the private equity entertainment empire is active in a buyers market. Some say NBC Universal’s theme park could soon wind up on the block if GE sells content assets to Comcast.

Of the $2.3 billion Blackstone will pay up front, only $1 billion is equity. More than half of the deal is being financed through borrowing, which in and of itself may be reason for Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman to scream with delight. Getting financing in these troubled times is no ride in the park.

The financial crisis has made the world less focused on the U.S., which will have to face up to the fact that it is not as significant as before, Carlyle Group co-founder David Rubenstein told a large audience at the World Business Forum in New York:

“After World War II we were 48 percent of the world’s GDP; now we are about 20 percent of the world’s GDP… We have to get used to the fact that the dollar is relatively cheap and … that the dollar is probably not going to be the reserve currency that it’s been for so many years.”

Rubenstein said the center of the financial world won’t just be New York, but spread between here, London, Shanghai, Dubai, Sao Paulo and a few other cities.

Rubenstein concentrated particularly on the U.S. economy’s problems, listing issues such as the deficit, inflation, taxes and employment. He said that the U.S. is about two years into the recession and probably has a “month or two to go.”

He listed the areas he thinks are attractive investment opportunities: distressed investing, companies getting support from the U.S. government, energy (both carbon and alternative),  healthcare and emerging markets such as China, India and Brazil.

Among the final tidbits of advice that the private equity chief shot at the audience was to avoid excessive leverage:

“What we learned out of this most recent recession is if you borrow a lot of money it comes home to roost, so I’d avoid leverage–even normal leverage can be very dangerous at times when the economy goes down.”

Somewhere out there are ailing companies in need of a turnaround specialist. These experts — also known as company doctors — parachute into troubled businesses to turn their business around.

Funds, such as Oaktree Capital, HIG Capital and Apollo Management, specialise in buying up companies in distress (either through buying equity or debt) and turning them round.

And this should be a great time for these investors — banks are loaded with stakes in troubled companies and unwieldy corporates may want to spin off unwanted businesses.

But banks are not playing ball. They want to wait until the economy recovers and sale values rise. So few companies are up for sale. But the funds want bank sales of stakes to accelerate otherwise it might be too late to turn these companies around.

Private equity certainly has the appetite for new deals. As Reuters reported yesterday, the private equity industry — which may have up to $1 trillion in ‘dry powder’ — is looking to the next restructuring wave for opportunities.

“Sponsors want new proprietary deals to show their limited partners they are not just churning portfolios,” a top investment banker told the Reuters Restructuring Summit.

French food group Danone has agreed to sell its 51 percent stake in its joint ventures with China’s Wahaha group, putting an end to legal proceedings related to the disputes between the two. In 2007, Danone accused Wahaha of illegally setting up parallel business outside their ventures. 

McGraw-Hill Cos is leaning toward selling its money-losing BusinessWeek magazine to Bloomberg LP, a person familiar with the matter tells Reuters. Bloomberg Markets, a financial news magazine that produces feature stories, and the 80-year-old BusinessWeek could be blended to make a title that would expand Bloomberg’s presence beyond its financial data clients and reach a mainstream audience.

For more on these stories and the rest of the latest deals news from Reuters, click here .

In M&A news from Wednesday’s newspapers:

Russian state bank VEB may get a stake in the troubled carmaker AvtoVAZ (AVAZ.MM) by acquiring an issue of its infrastructure bonds and converting them into equity, Kommersant business daily reports.

U.S. investment company Starwood Capital  is attempting to gain control of lodging chain Extended Stay Inc, the Wall Street Journal reports, citing people familiar with the matter.

Private equity firms Carlyle Group and 3i (III.L) are among those holding preliminary discussions to take a minority stake in India’s Strides Arcolab’s (STAR.BO) injectables business, the Economic Times reported, citing banking sources.