DealZone

For the latest deals news from Reuters, click here. And here’s the top stories from the newspapers (some external links may require subscription):

Italian chocolate maker Ferrero could be interested in Cadbury‘s gum and candy division, a unit worth about 5 billion euros ($7.4 billion), in a possible joint takeover bid, business daily Il Sole 24 Ore said on Friday.

TPG, Blackstone, Warburg Pincus, BC Partners and Advent are among the first-round bidders for discount retailer Matalan, which is being auctioned with an estimated price tag of about 1.5 billion pounds, the FT said.

Some of Goldman Sachs Group’s largest shareholders have asked the company to cut the size of its bonus pool and pass along more of its profits to investors, the Wall Street Journal said.

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.

A Warburg Pincus deal to invest $115 million in Webster Financial on Monday left at least some folks scratching their heads. 

The private equity firm agreed to start with an initial investment acquiring 5.9 percent of Webster’s common stock, to be raised to 15.2 percent after getting regulatory and other approvals. 

On the face of it, the 5.9 percent figure was unusual because the stake threshold for private investors in banks is 9.9 percent — beyond which they need to get the Fed to sign off on the deal.

Putting cold water on the idea that the IPO market was beginning to move past its doldrums, at least for fast growing companies, Bridgepoint Education‘s IPO priced 30 percent below expectations Tuesday night, going for $10.50 per share, a far cry from the $14-$16 range the college operator had hoped for.

Bridgepoint broke a short-lived two-IPO streak that saw Mead Johnson Nutrition Co and Changyou.com price at the top of their ranges and soar in their market debuts. And that was despite Bridgepoint’s enviable 150 percent revenue growth in 2008.

Still, Bridgepoint’s IPO brought some hope to venture capitalists, who have had to contend with a 90 percent drop in VC-backed IPOs in 2008, and are looking for an exit for their portfolio companies. Owned primarily by Warburg Pincus, Bridgepoint is the first venture-capital backed IPO since web hosting company Rackspace Hosting’s $187.5 million IPO in August 2008, according to Thomson Reuters.