James Taylor

Merrill Lynch has joined forces with Pacific Equity Partners to make its first foray into the Australasian private equity market, with a $659 million offer for credit checking company Veda Advantage.

US buyout firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts has signed yet another mega-deal, agreeing to pay $29 billion for First Data, a US listed electronic payments business. It has now signed up to over $100 billion of deals in a matter of weeks.

Specialist credit funds have revolutionised the leveraged loan market. But could this mean trouble for the private equity industry when things start to go wrong? James Taylor reports.

Esprit Capital Partners has sold its stake in fraud software business Neteconomy, as it hits the exit trail ahead of another fundraising round.

Nikko Principal Investments has sold UK firm RoadChef to an Israeli real estate group for £375 million. Nikko had owned the motorway service station chain for nearly ten years.

A study of the corporation tax bills of the ten biggest private equity backed firms in the UK has revealed that, between them, they actually depleted the Treasury’s coffers last year.

Falling return expectations could limit the number of attempted public-to-private deals in 2007, according to a new report.

In the week it emerged that UK retailer Sainsbury’s is the latest high-profile public company being targeted by private equity, new research shows that a record number of take-private deals were the biggest single source of the industry’s growth in the last 12 months.

As lenders continued to supply debt to the industry at increasingly favourable terms, private equity firms were able to cash in last year by taking big cash dividends from refinancing, writes James Taylor.

Eleven different groups have expressed an interest in bidding for struggling airline Alitalia, according to the Italian government, including Texas Pacific Group and Terra Firma.