SUPER DEAL: CERBERUS TO BUY SAFEWAY FOR $9 BILLION Â |Â In one of the largest leveraged buyouts since the financial crisis, a group led by the private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management agreed on Thursday to acquire Safeway in a deal worth more than $9 billion, Michael J. de la Merced and William Alden write in DealBook. The deal, which will be financed by $7.6 billion worth of borrowed money, is the biggest leveraged buyout so far this year. Cerberus plans to merge Safeway with Albertsons, a smaller grocery store chain that it owns.
Investors are expected to receive $40 a share, representing a 17 percent premium over Safeway’s stock price on Feb. 18, the day before the company disclosed that it was in sales talks with an unnamed bidder. The combination of Safeway and Cerberus’s holdings will have 2,400 stores and over 250,000 employees, bolstering the firm’s already sizable presence in the grocery store industry.
MAN IDENTIFIED AS MYSTERIOUS BITCOIN CREATOR DENIES IT  | Newsweek on Thursday rattled Bitcoin aficionados when it published an article that claimed to reveal Bitcoin’s creator, whose mysterious identity has been central to the virtual currency’s mythic status, Nathaniel Popper and Rachel Abrams write in DealBook. Bitcoin’s developer went by the name Satoshi Nakamoto, and the man the magazine claimed to be behind Bitcoin has a similar name â€" Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto, but don’t get too excited just yet.
The Mr. Nakamoto identified in the article denied involvement in Bitcoin on Thursday after a car chase involving a crowd of reporters. He told The Associated Press that he had not heard of the virtual currency until his son told him about being contacted by a reporter three weeks ago. Even if Newsweek’s report is true, virtual currency proponents were outraged by what they viewed as a violation of the very privacy the currency was intended to protect.
“Whatever the conclusion, the furor on Thursday laid bare just how far Bitcoin had moved beyond its humble origins five years ago â€" and just how much it still relied on the mystique of those beginnings,†Mr. Popper and Ms. Abrams write. They add, “Bitcoin watchers said that the creator’s supposed anonymity had played a vital role in the growth of a virtual currency that has become a potent symbol for privacy advocates and critics of government power.â€
From The Associated Press, which had an exclusive interview on Thursday with the Mr. Nakamoto identified in the Newsweek article: “Several times during the interview with AP, Nakamoto mistakenly referred to the currency as ‘bitcom,’ and as a single company, which it is not. He said he’s never heard of Gavin Andresen, a leading Bitcoin developer who told Newsweek he’d worked closely with the person or entity known as ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ in developing the system, but that they never met in person or spoke on the phone.â€
FORMER LEADERS AT ONCE-MIGHTY LAW FIRM INDICTED  | Four former top officials at the law firm Dewey & LeBoeuf were charged by New York prosecutors on Thursday with larceny and securities fraud, Matthew Goldstein writes in DealBook. Prosecutors said that the men, who used incriminating language in emails, orchestrated a nearly four-year scheme to manipulate the firm’s books to make it appear the firm was meeting certain financial conditions. The Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., said his office had already secured guilty pleas from seven other people who once worked for Dewey. Several others may also be cooperating with the two-year-old investigation.
The charges are the latest troubles for a once-mighty law firm, which filed for bankruptcy in May 2012. At its peak, the firm, created by the 2007 merger of Dewey Ballantine and LeBoeuf, Lamb, Greene & MacRae, had 26 offices around the globe and employed more than 1,300 people. But its bankruptcy revealed that, while Dewey was a brand-name operation, it failed to generate sufficient revenue to pay the big contracts of its star lawyers and meet its expensive overhead.
IT’S JOBS DAY  | Brace yourselves. February’s jobs data, which the Labor Department is set to report at 8:30 a.m. on Friday, is harder than usual to predict because of conflicting signals from private payroll surveys and seasonal factors like weather, Nelson D. Schwartz writes in the Economix blog. With the last two monthly reports â€" for January and December â€" falling well short of expectations, economists are eagerly waiting to see whether the disappointing numbers were a weather-related anomaly or a sign that underlying momentum in the economy is weakening. The consensus among economists on Wall Street is for employers to have added 149,000 positions in February, with the jobless rate flat at 6.6 percent.
ON THE AGENDA Â |Â In addition to the jobs report, the international trade report is out at 8:30 a.m. William C. Dudley, the president of the New York Fed, speaks at noon. Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, is on CNBC at 7:30 a.m. Thomas E. Perez, the labor secretary, is on CNBC at 9:35 a.m. Marianne Lake, the chief financial officer of JPMorgan Chase, is on Bloomberg TV at 10 a.m. The annual South by Southwest festival begins in Austin, Tex.
EXAMINING CLAIMS OF INSIDER TRADING AT THE S.E.C.  | Recent news reports, replete with eye-catching headlines like “The Incredible Stock-Picking Ability of S.E.C. Employees,†have suggested that staff members at the Securities and Exchange Commission were committing insider trading. But the likely truth is that S.E.C. staff members are no better than the rest of us at picking stocks, Steven M. Davidoff writes in the Deal Professor column.
The suggestion that S.E.C. staff traded on nonpublic information stems from the conclusion of an early draft of an academic paper that was not meant to be circulated publicly. But the authors’ actual conclusions are much more limited: The S.E.C. employees did not earn any abnormal return whatsoever when purchasing stock, though they did seem to be abnormally good at selling stocks at the right time. The S.E.C. responded with the explanation that any abnormal trading was because employees were forced to sell certain stocks if they were about to begin an investigation related to those companies.
If the paper’s empirical findings hold up, Mr. Davidoff writes, “this will be its value and it will be quite a good paper. It will show that the S.E.C. might want to rethink its sale rules for when investigations are initiated. The agency may also want to revisit its stock holding rules generally. But under no circumstance is there any evidence in this paper that the policy is promoting insider trading. Dumb luck maybe, but not insider trading.â€
Vivendi Gets Bids for SFR From Bouygues and Altice  | The French media and telecommunications conglomerate Vivendi said on Thursday that it had received offers for SFR, its cellphone unit, that could value the business at more than $20 billion.
DealBook »
Top Federal Antitrust Official Steps Back From Comcast Deal Inquiry  | The federal government’s top antitrust official, William J. Baer, has recused himself from the Justice Department’s review of Comcast’s proposed $45 billion takeover of Time Warner Cable, Edward Wyatt reports in The New York Times.
NEW YORK TIMES
Comcast Buys Freewheel for $360 Million  | The cable giant Comcast announced on Thursday that it had acquired Freewheel, an advertising start-up, in a deal valued at $360 million, Reuters reports.
REUTERS
Spotify Buys Echo Nest in Latest Music Technology Deal  | Spotify announced on Thursday that it had bought a company that analyzes music consumption patterns, as the competition over access to listeners’ data heats up, The New York Times reports. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
NEW YORK TIMES
Privacy Groups Ask Regulators to Stop Facebook’s Deal for WhatsApp  | Privacy advocates have asked United States regulators to halt Facebook’s $19 billion purchase of WhatsApp until there is a better understanding of how Facebook intends to use the personal data of WhatsApp’s users, Reuters writes.
REUTERS
Book Deal Falls Apart for Parodist of Goldman  | John Lefevre, the man behind the @GSElevator Twitter account, has lost his book deal after his true identity came to light.
DealBook »
2 Senior Citigroup Executives Retiring  | Eugene McQuade, the chief executive of Citibank, the entity that holds 70 percent of the company’s assets and runs its international businesses, is leaving, as is Cece Stewart, who runs Citigroup’s consumer and commercial banking operations in the United States.
DealBook »
Lloyds Bank Seeks to Swap More Than $8 Billion of Bonds  | The Lloyds Banking Group, which is partially owned by the British government, said it would offer to swap bonds used to shore up its capital during the financial crisis for new securities or cash.
DealBook »
Deutsche Bank Wins Auction for Australian Loan Book  | Deutsche Bank has won an auction for the $128 million loan portfolio of the collapsed Australian lender Gippsland Secured Investments, The Wall Street Journal writes.
WALL STREET JOURNAL
To Serve Wall Streeters, Long Hours and Exacting Labor  | Rudy Milian sounds much like any junior Wall Street worker when he talks about the demands of his previous job at a barbershop that almost exclusively serves Goldman Sachs employees.
DealBook »
Why This Isn’t China’s ‘Bear Stearns Moment’  | If the analogy with the crisis of 2008 has any use, writes Peter Thal Larsen of Reuters Breakingviews, it is as a reminder of which mistakes to avoid.
DealBook »
As Shares Soar, Buyout Barons Selling Firms’ Stock  | Top executives at three publicly traded private equity firms have sold more than $500 million of their firms’ stock over the past year, The Wall Street Journal writes.
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Assets at Carlyle Commodities Fund Fell by Half  | The private equity firm Carlyle Group said its commodities hedge fund Vermillion fell by more than half in the nine months to December, which could suggest that investors had decided to redeem at the fund after some negative returns.
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
Wall Street Leaders Seen at Art Show  | Henry R. Kravis, the co-founder of the private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, and the hedge fund manager Daniel S. Loeb of Third Point Capital were spotted on Tuesday at the Art Dealers Association of America’s annual Upper East Side Art Show, The New York Post writes.
NEW YORK POST
Casablanca Names 6 Candidates for Cliffs Natural Resources’ Board  | Casablanca Capital, the activist hedge fund pressing for change at Cliffs Natural Resources, started a proxy fight on Thursday, naming six candidates for the mining company’s board.
DealBook »
Okapi Partners, a Proxy Solicitor, Adds a Senior Executive  | The addition of Michael Fein, the founder of an investment firm, comes as Okapi continues to expand and compete against more established rivals in the proxy solicitation industry.
DealBook »
Initial Public Offerings Hit Fastest Pace in Years  | Companies are going public at the fastest pace in years to take advantage of booming share prices and investor demand while they last, The Wall Street Journal reports.
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Coupons.com Raises $168 Million in I.P.O.  | Coupons.com raised $168 million in its initial public offering, pricing its shares above the marketed range, Bloomberg Businessweek reports. The stock will start trading on Friday on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “COUP.â€
BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK
Spotify Said to Seek Credit Facility, Hinting at I.P.O. Â |Â Spotify, the music streaming giant, is said to be speaking with banks about raising a credit facility in a move that could be a step toward an initial public offering, Bloomberg News writes.
BLOOMBERG NEWS
Andreessen Horowitz Backs DigitalOcean, a Cloud Computing Start-Up  | The growth of DigitalOcean enticed the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz to lead a $37.2 million financing round, a rare instance when it has invested “outside the Valley.â€
DealBook »
Warner Brothers Leads Funding Round for Machinima  | Machinima, a YouTube network for gamers, is closing an $18 million funding round led by the movie studio Warner Brothers, ReCode writes, citing unidentified people familiar with the situation.
RECODE
Foreign Influx Gives Annual Tech Event an International Flavor  | Many Silicon Valley companies aren’t attending the South by Southwest festival, but companies from abroad are, Jenna Wortham writes in The New York Times.
NEW YORK TIMES
BNP Paribas and Bank of America Suspend Employees in Currency Investigation  | Bank of America Merrill Lynch has placed Joseph Landes on leave, while BNP Paribas has suspended Robert de Groot, according to people familiar with the matter. More than 20 traders have been suspended or fired amid inquiries into potential manipulation of the currency markets.
DealBook »
Japan Won’t Impose Banking Laws on Bitcoin  | The government of Japan released a six-page paper stating that Bitcoin is a commodity, not a currency, and will be subject to taxes but not regulations.
DealBook »
Solar Panel Maker Is First to Default in China’s Domestic Bond Market  | That no rescue emerged was viewed by analysts as a signal that China is serious about its commitment to carrying out market-oriented financial reform.
DealBook »
Futures Commission Appointees Talk With Senate Panel  | The nominees â€" Timothy Massad, who would become chairman, and Sharon Bowen and Christopher Giancarlo â€" now await a vote from the panel and full confirmation by the Senate.
DealBook »
Greek Bank Set to Be First in 5 Years to Tap Capital Markets  | Piraeus Bank, Greece’s largest lender, is planning to issue a bond that will be a significant test of investor interest.
DealBook »
The Hurdles in Getting Past a Wall of Silence  | The Justice Department may have feared reopening the debate about whether it adequately respects attorney-client privilege if it allowed regulators to pursue notes by JPMorgan Chase’s lawyers on the bank’s ties to Bernard L. Madoff, Peter J. Henning writes in the White Collar Watch column.
DealBook »
