Contributed by Martin Mitchell of the Corporate Training Group

In case you were too busy trying to stay warm (or, for our readers in the Southern Hemisphere, trying to stay cool) to have kept up with the news, contributor Martin Mitchell has gathered some important market events from last week to help you start this week well informed:

Mergers and Acquisitions

• A bid for Royal Bank of Scotland’s insurance assets is moving closer. Patrick Snowball, former head of Aviva’s UK operations, has teamed up with BC Partners and Apollo Management to bid for the insurance assets that were put up for sale by RBS last year.
• After the $52bn takeover of Anheuser-Busch, InBev has restarted the sale process for Oriental Brewery in South Korea. InBev first explored the sale of Oriental last autumn, but shelved the process because of the financial crisis. Analysts believe the sale could fetch $1.5bn to $2bn.
• InBev is also expected to auction Busch Entertainment, the owner of SeaWorld Orlando for up to $4bn. Potential bidders include Merlin Entertainments (owner of Madame Tussauds and Legoland) and Walt Disney.
• German company RWE has agreed to buy most of Essent, the Dutch power company for €9.3bn in an all-cash deal. The deal is conditional on 80 per cent of the issued and outstanding share capital being tendered and is expected to close in the third quarter of 2009. JPMorgan advised RWE, Citi advised Essent, Lazard advised Essent’s shareholders and Deutsche Bank advised Essent’s supervisory board.
• Air France-KLM purchased a 25% stake in the relaunched Italian airline Alitalia for €323m. Alitalia has just emerged from bankruptcy.

Financial Institutions

• Some key figures provide a useful summary of the banking crisis to date:

– The market capitalisation of the global bank and insurance sectors has fallen from $8,540bn in August 2007 to just $3,586bn in January 2009.

– Cumulative writedowns have reached $1,038bn

– Government injections from the US have reached $265bn and the UK $60bn

• Citigroup continued to make the headlines, with a break up plan. The plan involves the group splitting off around one third of the business’ higher risk activities (mainly sub-prime mortgages and the door to door insurance sales unit) from the remaining two-thirds of more stable activities (mainly the global commercial bank and the advisory and underwriting activities of the investment bank). Initially the businesses will be separately reported on, so that Citigroup investors can see the viability of the ‘lower risk’ business going forward.
• Citigroup is also in discussions with Morgan Stanley about a merging of their brokerage operations. The Morgan Stanley deal would involve Citi selling a 51% stake in its Smith Barney brokerage arm for $2.5bn to $3bn, and give Morgan Stanley an option to buy the remaining 49% stake within 3 to 5 years. Why is Morgan Stanley keen to boost its brokerage arm? The financial crisis has cut into its profitable business lines (particularly prime brokerage, merger advice and real estate investment). The Smith Barney JV will add 15,000 brokers to Morgan Stanley’s existing 8,000, as well as billions worth of assets under management.
• Barclays announced that it is axing 2,100 jobs – 1,300 at Barclays Capital, the investment bank, 500 at the private bank, Barclays Wealth and 330 at the asset manager, Barclays Global Investors. Barclays described the cuts as making the bank ‘appropriately sized given the current market conditions’. By the end of the week Barclays shares had fallen to just 98p, their lowest level since 1993. In response to a 25% fall in the share price on Friday, the bank took the highly unusual step of declaring that its profits for 2008 were ‘well ahead’ of the £5.3bn forecast by analysts. The results are not due to be reported until February 17th.
• The wisdom of Bank of America’s hasty acquisition of Merrill Lynch in September was placed in doubt as Merrill’s 4th quarter performance saw a $21.5bn operating loss. In response Bank of America secured a further capital infusion from the US government of $20bn. It also secured a loan guarantee on $118bn of troubled assets, most of which were sitting on Merrill’s books.
• Deutsche Bank will make its first annual loss in 50 years after losing €4.8bn in its final quarter. The annual results will show a net loss of €3.9bn for 2008. Deutsche Bank also revealed a restructured €4.9bn deal to buy Postbank, Germany’s largest retail bank from Deutsche Post.
• The Irish government nationalised Anglo Irish Bank. Anglo Irish is heavily exposed to the Irish property market.
• Royal Bank of Scotland has sold its 4.3% stake in the Bank of China for £1.65bn. The shares were placed with institutional investors at an 8% discount to the prevailing market price. The placing was arranged by RBS and Morgan Stanley.
• In a further blow to its reputation in a difficult week, Citigroup’s Corporate Special Opportunities hedge fund is returning just 3 cents on the dollar as it winds up.
• Balderton Capital, the venture capital group that specialises in technology and media investments, managed to shrug off the gloom in the financial markets and raise a $430m (£282m) fund.
• Steel Partners, an activist hedge fund group, is considering converting its flagship fund into a listed company. Steel Partners II is a $1.2bn fund and, if the plan goes ahead, it is likely to be listed on either the NYSE or Nasdaq. The plan is a response to the wave of redemption requests that are hitting hedge funds generally.
• Investors in Bernie Madoff’s funds looking to claim compensation for their losses are targeting their custodians. Both UBS and HSBC were custodians for European feeder funds that invested in Madoff funds.

Credit

• A ‘compression cycle’ for credit derivatives, where big investment banks prune older outstanding trades, saw $30,000bn removed from the market in 2008, three times the $10,000bn taken out in 2007.
• A survey has shown that the credit crisis has led to more than one third of large UK companies that do not use their full credit facilities have had them reduced by the banks.
• Standard and Poor’s has said that Spain’s triple A credit rating could be downgraded as it enters what could be a deep recession. Greece and Ireland have already received similar warnings.
• The ECB reduced its main policy rate by half a percent from 2.5% to 2.0%.
  German healthcare group Fresenius is about to sell $650m junk-rated bonds in Europe, the first European junk bond offering since the credit crunch. Fresenius is rated at BB, two notches below investment grade by Standard and Poor’s. The move follows a successful issue by US cable operator Cablevision of 5 year junk bonds in the US.

Other

• Mary Schapiro, currently the chief executive of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (Finra) has been nominated to take over at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) at a difficult time. The SEC has been subject to criticism due to its oversight failures during the financial crisis and its failure to spot Bernie Madoff’s $50bn ‘Ponzi’ scheme. Ms Shapiro’s background includes a stint as Chairman of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission – so she is well placed to oversee any rationalisation of the financial regulators in the US.

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