Deutsche Bank Economist to Join China’s Central Bank

HONG KONG â€" Deutsche Bank’s chief China economist is taking up a new role at China’s central bank.

Jun Ma, a 13-year veteran of the German bank who is also its head of China and Hong Kong strategy, is leaving to become the chief economist in the research bureau at the People’s Bank of China, according to an internal Deutsche Bank memo seen by DealBook.

Mr. Ma “has made a hugely significant contribution to the success of Deutsche Bank’s franchise in Asia and worldwide through his writing, his assiduous client service and his influence as a senior manager in research,” the memo said. “We believe he will serve China exceptionally well in his new role and we wish him every success.”

Mr. Ma is known as one of the most bullish of the economists who follow China. As recently as January, he was predicting 8.6 percent growth for China’s economy this year. Deutsche Bank’s recently reduced target of 7.8 percent growth in gross domestic product for 2014 is tied for the highest among the 55 economists surveyed by Bloomberg. It compares with a survey average of 7.4 percent growth and the Chinese government’s official target of 7.5 percent.

Mr. Ma did not immediately reply on Wednesday to emails seeking comment on his move.

It is uncommon but not unheard of for people to move from jobs with Wall Street companies to roles in Chinese government institutions.

In January, the American-trained fund manager Zhu Changhong left his role as the chief investment officer at the State Administration of Foreign Exchange in Beijing, the agency in charge of investing the nation’s $3.8 trillion in foreign exchange reserves. Mr. Zhu had been at SAFE, as the agency is known, for four years, after having worked as a fund manager at Pacific Investment Management Company, or Pimco, a huge bond trading and asset-management company based in California.

Among the various arms and agencies of the Chinese government, the central bank is viewed as among the most progressive in leading the current push for overhauls to the financial system. The governor of the People’s Bank of China, Zhou Xiaochuan, said last month that China would deregulate interest rates on bank deposits in one to two years.

Other plans include loosening of the government’s control on the currency and a pilot program to allow an initial group of five new banks to be established by private-sector companies. The new banks would be the first legal domestic banks to be free of direct or indirect government ownership.

Before joining Deutsche Bank in 2000, Mr. Ma worked as an economist at the International Monetary Authority and at the World Bank for eight years. Before that he spent two years at an economic research institution run by the State Council, or China’s cabinet. He is a graduate of Georgetown University in Washington and Shanghai’s Fudan University.

Official’s Remarks Attacking S.E.C.’s Timidness Causes Stir

A textbook retirement speech blends beloved anecdotes with tired clichés. James Kidney, a trial lawyer at the Securities and Exchange Commission who recently departed the agency, offered a different style: an airing of grievances.

Mr. Kidney’s farewell remarks - he slammed colleagues for “tentative and fearful” actions and implied that the S.E.C. “polices the broken windows on the street level and rarely goes to the penthouse floors” â€" have caused a stir on Wall Street and in Washington. The remarks came to light on Tuesday in a Bloomberg News report that also includes an interesting interview with Mr. Kidney, who said that he would “always be an S.E.C loyalist and was trying to offer constructive criticism that could help the agency.”

Mr. Kidney, who spent more than two decades at the agency, offered a theory for why the S.E.C. pulled some punches: the revolving door that shuttles its employees to Wall Street and back again.

Mr. Kidney also managed to land some jokes. (See: “I originally planned this to start at noon so I could give a four-hour speech getting even.”)

And even some of his jabs were playful, people who attended the speech told DealBook. So you might want avoid a literal reading of the text, which DealBook obtained. Mr. Kidney could not be reached for comment to verify the authenticity of the remarks.

An S.E.C. spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But in the past, S.E.C. officials have cited the record number of cases filed in the aftermath of the financial crisis as evidence of taking a hard line with Wall Street. The bank extracted settlements from Goldman Sachs and others.

According to Bloomberg News, Mr. Kidney worked on the Goldman case.

Appetite of Investors for I.P.O.s Seems to Ebb

Companies are rushing to the public markets on Wall Street to sell their shares, and this week is expected to be the busiest for initial public offerings in more than seven years.

But even as soaring stocks have fueled a surge in I.P.O.s, there are signs that investors are beginning to sour on the fresh arrivals. With a string of prominent companies set to go public, the week could provide a barometer for just how many new stocks investors will receive enthusiastically.

Already, it appears that appetite is waning. An exchange-traded fund that tracks the performance of recent offerings is down 2 percent so far this year, while the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index has ended up roughly flat. Just a month ago, the fund, created by Renaissance Capital, was up 8 percent for the year.

“The sound of that drop is the sound of the I.P.O. window starting to close,” said Kathleen S. Smith, a principal of Renaissance Capital, which researches new listings. “It’s not going to close all the way, but it’s going to get more selective.”

One big company making its debut, the hotel chain La Quinta Holdings, took a cautious approach in its pricing Tuesday evening. La Quinta, which is being taken public by the Blackstone Group, a giant private equity firm, priced its shares at $17 each, below an expected range of $18 to $21.

At that level, La Quinta raised $650 million, achieving a valuation of roughly $2 billion going into its trading debut.
Sixteen companies in all are expected to price their share offerings this week, the most since December 2006, by Renaissance Capital’s count. Among them is Ally Financial, the former financing arm of General Motors, whose listing will allow the Treasury Department to reduce its stake in Ally.

Investors will be paying close attention to how investors receive the companies on Wednesday, and whether they succumb to the latest pullback in the broader markets.

Some recent highly anticipated listings have already turned out to be disappointments.

King Digital Entertainment, which makes the popular Candy Crush Saga game, has yet to trade above the level in its I.P.O. last month. Castlight Health, a health care software start-up, has fallen back to earth after a huge pop in its first trading day.

Still, some companies are betting that a long-term market rally will resume. On Tuesday, Zoe’s Kitchen, a restaurant chain expected to go public this week, raised its expectations for its debut, saying in a regulatory filing that it expected to price its shares at $13 to $15, a full $2 higher than its previous estimate.

The market jitters may prove to be a passing phase.

“What we’re seeing in the marketplace is continued exuberance,” said Neil Dhar, head of the United States capital markets practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers. “We have a number of clients â€" private equity and corporates â€" that are looking to get to the marketplace really as fast as possible.”

The conservative pricing may help La Quinta achieve a more impressive performance in its first day of trading. Blackstone, which is not selling stock in the deal and will remain the majority shareholder, plans to wait to sell its stake over time.

The deal is expected to be a successful one for Blackstone. At the I.P.O. price, Blackstone has achieved a return on paper of nearly three times its invested capital, including dividends it has collected from the company, according to a person briefed on the deal who was not authorized to speak publicly about it.

Blackstone bought La Quinta near the top of the market, paying $3.4 billion in 2006. The chain, based in Irving, Tex., soon grappled with the economic downturn, which wounded the hotel business as travelers cut back.

Now, after expanding its portfolio of franchised hotels and establishing a bigger presence in Latin America, La Quinta is hoping to benefit from increased consumer spending. It was set to start trading on Wednesday under the ticker symbol LQ on the New York Stock Exchange.

Hilton, La Quinta’s larger cousin, which Blackstone bought in 2007, has performed reasonably well since its splashy debut in December, with its shares up nearly 7 percent from the I.P.O. price. Another hotel company backed by Blackstone, Extended Stay America, has risen nearly 15 percent since it went public in November.

Mr. Dhar of PricewaterhouseCoopers said that the “openings and shuttings” of a favorable market window were more pronounced now than in the past. Companies, he said, are planning accordingly. “They’re a lot more diligent about preparing their marketing materials and their regulatory materials,” he said, “so they can jump in.”

Your Homework Assignment: Sue the Federal Government

Some law school students send the Justice Department résumés and references. At the University of Virginia School of Law, one class is sending document requests and lawsuits.

The students, along with professors and a university librarian, are tackling the contentious world of white-collar crime, challenging federal prosecutors to unseal settlements with big banks and corporations. In a matter of months, the classroom litigators at the law school’s First Amendment clinic filed their first lawsuit against the Justice Department and won the release of a secret settlement deal.

Building on the test case, the clinic ramped up its effort this week, filing a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain 30 other settlement deals that remain under wraps, a preliminary move that could foreshadow another lawsuit. The deals â€" mostly nonprosecution agreements with the British bank HSBC, the casino Las Vegas Sands Corporation and a smattering of other corporate giants â€" spared the companies indictment in exchange for cash penalties and other concessions.

The clinic’s effort, which echoes broader public and congressional concern that nonprosecution agreements amount to a slap on the wrist, may shine a light on the fine print of the few deals that are not already public. The clinic’s first lawsuit, which focused on a sealed nonprosecution agreement with a tree landscaping company, argued that the secrecy undermined “the strong public interest in understanding the judicial system and why admitted wrongdoers are not criminally prosecuted,” underscoring the broader purpose of the students’ effort.

“You can’t have a robust public debate when you can’t see what your government is up to,” said Paula Salamoun, 25, a third-year law student who drafted much of the clinic’s first lawsuit against the Justice Department.

The Department of Justice declined to comment for this article.

The secret deals are the exception rather than the rule. United States attorney’s offices have unsealed 90 percent of the roughly 300 nonprosecution and deferred prosecution agreements reached over the last 25 years or so, according to a database maintained by Brandon L. Garrett and Jonathan Ashley, both of the Virginia law school. Mr. Ashley is the law school’s business research librarian, while Professor Garrett teaches law and is the author of the forthcoming book, “Too Big to Jail: How Prosecutors Compromise With Corporations.”

After scanning prosecutors’ news releases and searching court dockets, Mr. Ashley and Professor Garrett pinpointed 31 missing deals. The gap presented something of a mystery: Why would prosecutors talk up a case only to hide the underlying agreement from the public eye?

In some cases, there might be an innocent explanation. The deal, for example, might have slipped through the cracks during a period that predated the era of online court records.

But in other cases, the students said, the lack of transparency seemed arbitrary. And without access to the agreements, they could not understand why prosecutors settled on a certain fine or imposed a particular reform.

The seven-student clinic started the project small, or at least alphabetically, questioning the case of ABC Professional Tree Services. Although prosecutors in Houston issued a 2012 news release announcing a nonprosecution agreement with ABC â€" and a $2 million penalty to resolve claims that the company’s work force included undocumented immigrants â€" the deal was nowhere to be found.

In June 2012, the clinic filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act, the federal law that generally requires government agencies to divulge documents on request from the public. But the government resisted, citing a battery of exemptions to the law.

“Something didn’t smell right,” said John Castle, 26, a second-year law student at the clinic. “It was not clear why they had invoked these exemptions.”

And so, with no shortage of helpers, the students decided to sue. The clinic’s co-leaders â€" Josh Wheeler, director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression, and Bruce D. Brown, the executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press â€" oversaw the process. Emily Grannis, a freedom of information legal fellow at the Reporters Committee, edited the students’ work. And Mr. Ashley agreed to file the complaint in his name.

After an initial fight, prosecutors reversed course last month and released the six-page nonprosecution agreement. The government offered no explanation for the change of heart.

The experience emboldened the students to request the 30 remaining deals, which spanned the last two decades and a number of industries. Edward D. Jones struck a deal in 2004, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston settled a sex abuse scandal in 2005, and the medical devices company C. R. Bard reached an agreement last year â€" all of which remain private. HSBC’s 2001 deal stemmed from a subsidiary admitting to fraud, while Las Vegas Sands paid $47 million to prosecutors in California to avoid prosecution for its “failure to alert authorities that a high-stakes gambler, who was later linked to international drug trafficking, made numerous large and suspicious deposits with the casino.”

For law school students, typically schooled on the minutiae of civil procedure but unprepared to write an actual brief, the clinic is a rare chance to cut their teeth on real-world litigation. The clinic, a yearlong class that provides course credit, also went to court to secure reports that an independent monitor filed about the American International Group in the years leading up to the 2008 financial crisis.

Of course, all this real-world experience might irritate a few prosecutors. But the students were not seeking jobs at the Justice Department to begin with.

Ms. Salamoun has lined up a job at a Washington law firm, and Mr. Castle is interested in working at another government agency: the Federal Communications Commission.

Tech-Focused Hedge Fund to Return $2 Billion to Investors

As investors nurse steep losses from  technology stocks, one hedge fund has decided to return money to investors and turn its focus to companies not listed on the stock market.

Coatue Management, the $7 billion technology-focused hedge fund founded by Philippe Laffont, will return more than $2 billion to investors in its flagship fund.

The decision, which Mr. Laffont called “tough but fair and necessary,” comes after the hedge fund’s flagship fund lost nearly 9 percent in March, according to a letter to investors. Since the start of the year, it is down more than  7 percent. Mr. Laffont said the firm had been considering cutting the firm’s size over the past 18 months.

“Coatue lost money on both sides of the portfolio: long and short,” Mr. Laffont wrote. “We have dealt with tough markets in the past, however. We are confident that we have the ideas and risk management to navigate this environment.”

The firm, which recently opened an office in the heart of the Silicon Valley venture capital  world, on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, Calif., has plans to raise money for a second so-called hybrid fund that will focus on venture capital investments in new technology companies, according to a person briefed on the fund’s plans.

Mr. Laffont also said the move will allow the firm to “go back on the offence.” Coatue is among a group of hedge fund investors, including Chase Coleman of the New York-based hedge fund Tiger Global, who are participating in fund-raising rounds for some of Silicon Valley’s hottest new start-ups. Both Mr. Coleman and Mr. Laffont worked for Julian Robertson’s hedge fund empire Tiger Management and are considered “Tiger Cubs.”

Coatue has invested in a series of start-ups like Snapchat, Hotel Tonight and Box, which filed plans for an initial public offering in March. Last week, the quirky ride-sharing company Lyft announced it had received $250 million from investors including Coatue.

The hedge fund plans to raise money for a new fund that will be more focused on private equity-type investments similar to those it has made in recent years, according to someone familiar with the firm’s thinking. The new fund would be capped at around $500 million, the person added.

Coatue was not the only hedge fund to suffer blows in the first quarter, and many investors in technology stocks were burned in March when some of the sector’s highest flying stocks came to a crashing fall.

Shares of companies including Blackberry and Tesla have plummeted by the double digits, after a strong run up over 2013, fueled by investor appetite for companies that promised high growth.

For many, the exuberance had been akin to the technology bubble in 2000.

Referring to the market moves in March, Mr. Laffont â€" who has been investing in technology stocks for more than a decade â€" told investors that the jolt was “as sudden and deep as some of the gut-wrenching dislocations of 2000-2002 and 2008-2009.”

Coatue’s letter was reported earlier by CNBC.

 

Regulators Set to Approve New Capital Rule

A campaign to make the financial system safer advanced on Tuesday, as federal regulators were expected to approve a rule that could put large banks on a firmer footing and persuade them to pare back potentially risky Wall Street activities.

And in a move that could further unsettle the financial industry, the authorities proposed a change to the new rule that could make it even tougher. The regulators estimated that the nation’s eight largest banks would need to raise as much as $68 billion to $95 billion to meet the requirements of the new rule.

The rule, known as the supplementary leverage ratio, puts a stricter cap on the amount of borrowing that banks do to raise money to make loans and buy securities. The new rule effectively requires big banks to raise more money from their shareholders and borrow less from depositors and creditors. When banks become overreliant on borrowing, known as leverage in the industry, they are more vulnerable to losses and market instability. This occurred in the run-up to the financial crisis of 2008, and was one of the main reasons that banks needed taxpayer bailouts.

“Banks with stronger capital positions are in a better position to lend, to compete favorably in any market, and to achieve satisfactory results for investors,” Thomas M. Hoenig, vice chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and a firm proponent of the rule, said in a statement. “Without sufficient capital, the opposite is true.”

The Fed, along the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, were all scheduled to meet on Tuesday to approve the rule.

The banks fought the rule because they felt it was too blunt and in some ways unnecessary.

One regulator, William C. Dudley of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, had raised concerns about the rule, and suggested that the rule writers consider whether it could work against monetary policy.

The new rule requires banks to increase their leverage ratio, which measures their capital as a percentage of their assets. Capital mostly represents funds raised from shareholders, so as capital goes up, banks in theory borrow less.

Under the new rule, the country’s largest banks would effectively be required to have a leverage ratio of 5 percent at their holding companies, and 6 percent at the subsidiary banks insured by the F.D.I.C.  They have until the start of 2018 to reach those levels, and beginning next year they have to start disclosing their calculations of their leverage ratios.

The change to the new rule proposed on Tuesday would most likely make it more onerous for banks that do a lot of Wall Street trading. The tweak requires banks to count a wider array of assets when calculating the ratio, even assets that might not be fully reflected on their balance sheets. As the asset total rises, the bank would have to hold more capital. A Wall Street product that will have more weight in the asset calculation is credit derivatives, the financial instruments that allow banks and investors to bet on the perceived creditworthiness of corporations.

The regulators did not disclose which banks fall short of the ratio today. But, with the proposed change, the holding companies of eight big banks would need to raise $68 billion in capital to meet the higher leverage ratio.

At the insured bank subsidiaries, the theoretical shortfall is even higher at $95 billion, according to a regulatory official on a press call on Tuesday. Regulators, however, said that banks could take steps to reduce the capital deficit by reducing their exposure to the risks of certain assets.

“The financial crisis showed that some financial companies had grown so large, leveraged, and interconnected that their failure could pose a threat to overall financial stability,” Janet L. Yellen, chairwoman of the Federal Reserve, said in a statement. “Today’s action is another step in the Federal Reserve’s efforts to address those risks.”

 

 

Revamped SAC Hires an Internal Watchdog

A former federal prosecutor and hedge fund general counsel is now keeping tabs on trading at Steven A. Cohen’s new family office, Point72 Asset Management.

Mr. Cohen’s firm, in a memorandum to employees on Tuesday, announced that it had hired Vincent Tortorella as the firm’s chief surveillance officer, a new position. Mr. Tortorella most recently was general counsel for Coatue Management, the hedge fund led by Philippe Laffont. Before that he was a prosecutor in the United States attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York and general counsel with Guidepoint Global, an expert networking firm that specializes in matching up hedge fund traders and analysts with industry consultants.

The chief surveillance officer post is part of an effort by Mr. Cohen to remake his image and show federal prosecutors that Point72 will not repeat the improper trading on inside information that landed his former SAC Capital Advisors in trouble.

On Thursday, Judge Laura Taylor Swain of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York is scheduled to decide whether to accept SAC’s guilty plea to insider trading charges and its deal with prosecutors to pay a $1.2 billion penalty.

Mr. Cohen is transitioning SAC into a family office that will manage his personal fortune of $9 billion to $10 billion. He restructured his former firm and renamed its flagship portfolio Point72, a reference to the street in Stamford, Conn., where its headquarters is situated. Point72 made its official debut on Monday with a new sign erected outside the firm’s headquarters at 72 Cummings Point Road.

In the memo, Point72 said, “One of the first things we want Vinny to do is to review our surveillance system and suggest enhancements or other changes to improve the monitoring of contact and information flow with the sell side and independent research firms.”

Mr. Tortorella’s position will be separate from an outside consultant Mr. Cohen is hiring as part of the settlement with federal prosecutors to monitor the operations of the firm for about a year. Mr. Cohen and federal prosecutors have agreed upon the hiring of Bart M. Schwartz, a former federal prosecutor who has served as an independent monitor in several government investigations, if Judge Swain approves. Mr. Schwartz is chairman and chief executive of Guidepost Solutions, a compliance and security firm based in New York.

A spokesman for Point72 declined to comment on the memo about Mr. Tortorella.

Private Equity’s New Kind of Club Deal

Trendy new buyout clubs may disappoint their eager would-be patrons. Blackstone Group is enlisting some of its fund investors to help buy auto-parts maker Gates for $5.4 billion. Such collectives are increasingly displacing teams of private equity firms in bigger deals. Returns from so-called co-investing, though, could make it a passing fad.

The $1.6 billion equity check needed to pay for Gates is more than even industry giant Blackstone wants to commit to a single deal. TPG considered partnering with Blackstone but backed out. Club deals like that have largely fallen out of fashion. Their popularity crested during the pre-2007 buyout boom when ever-bigger takeovers were de rigueur, but clashes over management, operations and exit timing often proved troublesome.

Instead, as deals grow larger again, buyout firms are inviting selected limited partners to invest alongside them. According to a survey released last month by the research firm Preqin, nearly a third of shops plan to offer more co-investment opportunities than they did a year before, and half of private equity investors intend to increase their co-investment activity.

Cooperation of this sort makes sense in a lot of ways. Buyout firms bind themselves more closely to certain investors, making it easier to raise new funds when the time comes. Sovereign wealth funds and pension plans, meanwhile, escape management fees, invest capital more quickly and keep more of the gains for themselves. Yet for these tag-along investors, there’s a big theoretical risk.

A new study of almost 600 buyouts over a 30-year span by private equity adviser Altius Associates underscores the problem. The deals on average delivered an internal rate of return of 16.5 percent. A simulated 10-company portfolio, a proxy for hypothetical co-investments, generated a similar return. But introducing adverse selection, the possibility that co-investors might not choose or be granted access to the top 10 percent of buyouts in terms of profitability, brought the average internal rate of return down to less than 1 percent.

In practice, keen co-investors would be unlucky to miss out only on the very best deals. They won’t have access to all of them, however. Many limited partners also won’t be properly equipped to evaluate the ones they are welcomed to join, especially in the short time usually required. Nightclub owners know that velvet ropes create psychological appeal. Getting past them, though, can often be a letdown.

Jeffrey Goldfarb is an assistant editor at Reuters Breakingviews. For more independent commentary and analysis, visit breakingviews.com.

Senate Panel Approves C.F.T.C. Nominations

The Senate Agriculture Committee on Tuesday approved the nomination of Timothy G. Massad, a former corporate lawyer, as chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, one of Wall Street’s hardest hitting watchdogs.

The Senate committee also approved the nominations of Sharon Y. Bowen and J. Christopher Giancarlo as commissioners. The three now await full confirmation from the Senate.

If confirmed, Mr. Massad would succeed Gary S. Gensler, who became chairman of the agency after the financial crisis and who was given the task of establishing tougher rules on derivatives and futures as part of the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul law. For Mr. Massad, the focus will be on enforcing these new rules.

“Today, the C.F.T.C.’s role is even more important because it has the responsibility to bring much-needed regulation to the markets for over-the-counter derivatives,” Mr. Massad said at a committee hearing a month ago.

The agency sharpened its teeth during Mr. Gensler’s tenure. Under Dodd-Frank, the C.F.T.C’s purview was expanded from the $40 trillion futures industry to the $400 trillion derivatives market. Under its new mandate, the agency issued fines to big financial institutions like Barclays, UBS and JPMorgan Chase.

The three new commissioners all bring years of Wall Street experience to their posts. Mr. Massad was a lawyer at Cravath & Swain for more than two decades before he went on to become an assistant secretary at the Treasury Department in charge of winding down the the government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program.

Mr. Giancarlo, who would fill the Republican seat left by Jill E. Sommers, is a senior executive of the interdealer broker GFI Group. He has promised to resign from GFI if confirmed

Ms. Bowen, who would succeed the agency’s most liberal and outspoken member, Bart Chilton, is a former securities lawyer at Latham & Watkins. Some consumer advocates have questioned whether her experience representing some of Wall Street’s biggest financial institutions could influence her decisions as commissioner.

On Tuesday, Senator Saxby Chambliss, Republican of Georgia, voted against her nomination, saying he did not think she was qualified for the job.

Questioning the Valley’s No-Poaching Pacts

“A high-stakes negotiation is taking place in Silicon Valley among some of the biggest names in the industry â€" Apple and Google among them â€" over accusations that they were involved in a collusion to prevent their employees from being hired at rival companies,” Andrew Ross Sorkin writes in the DealBook column. The employees have filed a class-action lawsuit contending that the illegal hiring practices cost them $9 billion in lost wages. The companies are hoping to settle the case in the next several weeks.

The evidence against the firms appears to be one-sided and includes emails from Steve Jobs, the chief executive of Apple at the time, and Google’s chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt. Some lawyers said that a company’s blanket ban on hiring as part of a systemic strategy would be anticompetitive. Others argued that as long as there was not a reciprocal stated arrangement, companies had wide latitude about their hiring practices. Regardless, the executives involved at the highest levels of the no-hiring scheme appear to have known it was illegal, or at least in a gray area.

GUY HANDS’S GREEN THUMB  |  Guy Hands, who founded and runs the British private equity company Terra Firma, bought the music giant EMI in 2007. But he has had “much more success selling resin garden animals and bedroom slippers to retirees in garden centers across Britain,” Jenny Anderson writes in DealBook. Mr. Hands bought the Garden Centre Group in 2012 for 276 million pounds, or $459 million.

The purchase of the Garden Centre has shown that Mr. Hands has a green thumb, at least for gardening investments. The company’s earnings before taxes, depreciation and amortization were up 50 percent last year, to £42.7 million, or $70.8 million. Mr. Hands said that the Garden Centre gets back to Terra Firma’s roots â€" buying asset-backed businesses in need of restructuring in essential industries.

Ms. Anderson writes: “But Mr. Hands will need more than the sweet scent of roses to make up for the mess left over from EMI, the music company he bought at the top of the market for £4 billion ($6.3 billion) in the largest private equity deal ever done in Britain. The company, facing crushing amounts of debt, was seized by its lenders in 2011, erasing two-thirds of Mr. Hands’s wealth and his reputation as one of Britain’s savviest investors.”

SAC BECOMES POINT72  |  “They’ve changed the sign. They’ve changed the email address. And presumably they will soon be giving out new fleece jackets at Point72 Asset Management, the new family office that will trade billions of dollars of Steven A. Cohen’s money and is the legal successor to his once-mighty SAC Capital Advisors hedge fund,” Matthew Goldstein writes in DealBook. The retirement of the SAC name happened quietly over the weekend.

The subdued changing of the guard to Point72 from SAC is probably a reflection of the fact that this is an important week for Mr. Cohen, as a federal judge will decide whether to accept or reject SAC’s guilty plea to insider trading charges. The hearing on Thursday before Judge Laura Taylor Swain of the United States District Court in Manhattan may move Mr. Cohen one step closer to putting the federal government’s nearly decade-long investigation of his firm behind him.

“But whether Point72 will be able to replicate the kind of trading success that SAC generated over its 22-year history will depend a lot on whether the investigation of Mr. Cohen and his firm has really come to an end. Another significant arrest of a top trader who once worked for SAC could make it impossible for the Wall Street banks that continue to lend money to Point72 to continue those relationships,” Mr. Goldstein writes.

ON THE AGENDA  |  The Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey comes out at 10 a.m. Narayana Kocherlakota, president of the Minneapolis Fed, gives a speech at 1:30 p.m. Charles I. Plosser, president of the Philadelphia Fed, speaks on prudential regulation at 2:45 p.m. in Philadelphia. Charles L. Evans, president of the Chicago Fed, sits on a panel at 4 p.m. to discuss fiscal policy. The House Committee on Financial Services holds a hearing at 10 a.m. entitled “Who’s in Your Wallet: Examining How Washington Red Tape Impairs Economic Freedom.” The Senate Budget Committee holds a hearing at 10:30 a.m. to examine supporting broad-based economic growth and fiscal responsibility through a fairer tax code.

EQUITY FUND BUYS MATZO MAKER  |  The Manischewitz Company, whose matzo and gefilte fish are staples of Seder tables around the world, is expected to announce on Tuesday that it has been sold to Sankaty Advisors, an arm of the private equity giant Bain Capital, William Alden writes in DealBook. The deal comes just in time for Passover, which begins next week, and may help the 126-year-old company expand beyond the kosher aisle. The price of the deal has not been disclosed.

Manischewitz has bounced around various owners over the last two decades. Under its new owner, the company is expected to promote “kosher” as a quality-control designation, rather than simply a religious one. The company estimates that roughly 60 percent of its products are now sold in kosher aisles of supermarkets. But by introducing new products and relying on more mainstream foods like sardines and soup, it hopes to shift that balance. Manischewitz is also trying to capitalize on the craze for pure and healthy food, including by offering gluten-free items.

 

Mergers & Acquisitions »

Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals to Buy Questcor for $5.6 Billion  |  Questcor Pharmaceuticals has been criticized for steadily raising the price of its most valuable product, but that aggressive pricing strategy appears to have paid off for the drug maker. DealBook »

Deal for Questcor May Create More Headaches for Acquirer  |  Mallinckrodt’s deal to buy Questcor gives the company a tax advantage, but the company it is buying is barraged by regulatory inquiries, Robert Cyran of Reuters Breakingviews writes. DealBook »

Antitrust Hurdles Loom Large for Giant Cement Merger  |  Holcim of Switzerland and Lafarge of France will need to persuade regulators in 15 jurisdictions that they are prepared to reduce overlap in regions where their combined market concentration reduces competition. DealBook »

China’s Dominance in Cement Has Little Effect on European Suppliers  |  Cement is heavy to transport and relatively inexpensive to produce, so China’s dominance in the industry has little bearing on global supplies or prices. DEALBOOK

Laclede to Buy Alabama Gas Corp. in $1.6 Billion Deal  |  With its purchase of the Alabama Gas Corporation, Laclede will own the biggest natural gas utility in the state and make its first big move outside its home state of Missouri. DealBook »

Drug Sale Shows Risk in Japan’s M.&A. Adventures  |  Sun Pharmaceutical should have a better chance of getting a grip on Ranbaxy, though it is hardly getting a steal, Peter Thal Larsen of Reuters Breakingviews writes. DealBook »

INVESTMENT BANKING »

Diamond Taps Barclays Executive to Head Atlas Mara  |  Robert E. Diamond Jr., a former chief executive of Barclays, has appointed John Vitalo, the Barclays chief executive for the Middle East and North Africa since 2009, as group chief executive at Atlas Mara Co-Nvest, which is focused on investing in the African financial sector. DealBook »

JPMorgan to Shift Executives at Corporate and Investment Bank  |  Daniel E. Pinto, who two weeks ago became sole chief executive of JPMorgan Chase’s corporate and investment bank, has announced a number of executive shifts within his division. DealBook »

Banks Take Annual Meetings Far From Home  |  Many of the biggest American banks, which once held their annual meetings in New York or other metropolitan headquarters, are now moving to smaller venues, The Financial Times writes. FINANCIAL TIMES

Former Banker Turns to Progressive Politics  |  Gus Christensen was an investment banker until four months ago. But the former JPMorgan Chase derivatives trader and Goldman Sachs banker is now running a campaign for New York State Assembly and wants to raise taxes on the rich, Max Abelson of Bloomberg News writes. BLOOMBERG NEWS

PRIVATE EQUITY »

Warburg Pincus Takes Majority Stake in Aviation Technology Firm  |  The private equity firm Warburg Pincus will acquire a stake in mercator, an information technology services provider to the airline industry, from a unit of the Emirates Group, which will retain a minority stake in the business. DealBook »

Amid Bids for Deoleo, Spain’s Government Seeks to Protect Olive Oil Sector  |  At least three foreign bidders submitted offers last week for Deoleo, Spain’s biggest olive oil company, but the national government is warning any buyer against reducing focus on Spanish olive oil farming. DealBook »

Sheridan Healthcare Prepares for I.P.O.  |  Sheridan Healthcare, which is owned by the private equity firm Hellman & Friedman, has hired Credit Suisse, Barclays and Goldman Sachs to lead its initial public offering, The Wall Street Journal reports, citing unidentified people familiar with the situation. The offering may raise $400 million to $500 million and could value the company at more than $2 billion. WALL STREET JOURNAL

Inflated Private Equity Fees Said to Have Been Found by S.E.C.  |  A majority of private equity firms inflate fees and expenses charged to companies in which they hold stakes, according to an internal review by the Securities and Exchange Commission, Bloomberg News reports, citing an unidentified person familiar with the situation. More than half of about 400 firms examined by the S.E.C. have charged unjustified fees and expenses without notifying investors. BLOOMBERG NEWS

HEDGE FUNDS »

Highbridge Capital Hires a Trader in London  |  The hedge fund Highbridge Capital Management, which recently hired away two portfolio managers from Steven A. Cohen, has recruited a portfolio manager in London from Claren Road Asset Management, a division of the Carlyle Group. DealBook »

Paulson’s Advantage Plus Fund Said to Have Fallen 7.4% in March  |  The Paulson Advantage Plus Fund is said to have dropped 7.4 percent in March, hurt in part by losses in the gold market, Reuters reports, citing unidentified people familiar with the situation. REUTERS

I.P.O./OFFERINGS »

Rough First Day of Trading for Lands’ End, and Its Former Parent  |  Shares in Lands’ End tumbled in their debut on Monday, falling 6.7 percent, and Sears Holdings’ shares also declined. DealBook »

I.P.O. Market Expects Busiest Week Since 2007  |  A total of 14 initial public offerings listed in the United States are scheduled to price through Thursday night, The Wall Street Journal reports. WALL STREET JOURNAL

Marketing Software Company Yodle Selects Banks for I.P.O.  |  Yodle, a marketing software company, has selected Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank to lead the process for an initial public offering that is expected to come later this year, Reuters reports, citing unidentified people familiar with the situation. The I.P.O. could raise $100 million. REUTERS

Floor & Decor’s Owners Planning I.P.O.  |  The private equity firms Ares International and Freeman Spogli are planning an initial public offering of the home improvement retailer Floor & Decor for later this year, Reuters reports, citing unidentified people familiar with the situation. REUTERS

VENTURE CAPITAL »

Fenway Summer Acquires Start-Up Mortgage Lender  |  A firm started by Raj Date, a former official at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, plans to start making home loans in the next few months. DealBook »

Silicon Valley Pours Funds Into Education Technology  |  “Education technology start-ups attracted $1.25 billion in funding in 2013, according to analysis by CB Insights, and the boom has grown in 2014, with education technology companies attracting nearly half that amount ($559 million) during the first quarter alone,” John McDuling writes in Quartz. QUARTZ

The Cautionary Tale of Better Place  |  The Israeli start-up Better Place had almost $1 billion in funding and ambitions to replace petroleum-based cars with a fleet of cheap electric vehicles, Max Chafkin writes in Fast Company. So why did the company fail? FAST COMPANY

LEGAL/REGULATORY »

Citigroup to Pay $1.13 Billion to Settle Securities Claims  |  The pact reached with 18 institutional investors called for the bank to make a binding offer to the trustees of 68 trusts it sponsored that bundled some $59.4 billion in home loans. DealBook »

Puerto Rico Hires Bankruptcy Lawyers  |  The move by the Government Development Bank, which oversees all of the commonwealth’s debt deals, raises the specter that Puerto Rico is preparing to revamp its finances. DealBook »

In Scrutiny of Comcast Merger, Internet Choice Will Be Crucial  |  Comcast’s position that there will be no diminution of cable TV competition in its proposed takeover of Time Warner Cable may be beside the point, Edward Wyatt writes in The New York Times. NEW YORK TIMES

Fed Gives Banks Extension for Part of Volcker Rule  |  The Federal Reserve said on Monday that it would give banks two more years to ensure that their collateralized loan obligations do not fall under the Volcker Rule’s ban on speculative investments, The Wall Street Journal reports. WALL STREET JOURNAL

‘Flash Boys’ Fuels More Calls for a Tax on Trading  |  Michael Lewis’s new book “Flash Bots” has revived a fan club for new taxes, especially among economists and legal experts, Nelson D. Schwartz writes in The New York Times. NEW YORK TIMES

High-Frequency Trading Falls in the Cracks of Criminal Law  |  What the high-frequency trading firms are doing does not fit comfortably into any of the typical theories of securities fraud, Peter J. Henning writes in the White Collar Watch column. DealBook »

Questioning the Valley’s No-Poaching Pacts

“A high-stakes negotiation is taking place in Silicon Valley among some of the biggest names in the industry â€" Apple and Google among them â€" over accusations that they were involved in a collusion to prevent their employees from being hired at rival companies,” Andrew Ross Sorkin writes in the DealBook column. The employees have filed a class-action lawsuit contending that the illegal hiring practices cost them $9 billion in lost wages. The companies are hoping to settle the case in the next several weeks.

The evidence against the firms appears to be one-sided and includes emails from Steve Jobs, the chief executive of Apple at the time, and Google’s chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt. Some lawyers said that a company’s blanket ban on hiring as part of a systemic strategy would be anticompetitive. Others argued that as long as there was not a reciprocal stated arrangement, companies had wide latitude about their hiring practices. Regardless, the executives involved at the highest levels of the no-hiring scheme appear to have known it was illegal, or at least in a gray area.

GUY HANDS’S GREEN THUMB  |  Guy Hands, who founded and runs the British private equity company Terra Firma, bought the music giant EMI in 2007. But he has had “much more success selling resin garden animals and bedroom slippers to retirees in garden centers across Britain,” Jenny Anderson writes in DealBook. Mr. Hands bought the Garden Centre Group in 2012 for 276 million pounds, or $459 million.

The purchase of the Garden Centre has shown that Mr. Hands has a green thumb, at least for gardening investments. The company’s earnings before taxes, depreciation and amortization were up 50 percent last year, to £42.7 million, or $70.8 million. Mr. Hands said that the Garden Centre gets back to Terra Firma’s roots â€" buying asset-backed businesses in need of restructuring in essential industries.

Ms. Anderson writes: “But Mr. Hands will need more than the sweet scent of roses to make up for the mess left over from EMI, the music company he bought at the top of the market for £4 billion ($6.3 billion) in the largest private equity deal ever done in Britain. The company, facing crushing amounts of debt, was seized by its lenders in 2011, erasing two-thirds of Mr. Hands’s wealth and his reputation as one of Britain’s savviest investors.”

SAC BECOMES POINT72  |  “They’ve changed the sign. They’ve changed the email address. And presumably they will soon be giving out new fleece jackets at Point72 Asset Management, the new family office that will trade billions of dollars of Steven A. Cohen’s money and is the legal successor to his once-mighty SAC Capital Advisors hedge fund,” Matthew Goldstein writes in DealBook. The retirement of the SAC name happened quietly over the weekend.

The subdued changing of the guard to Point72 from SAC is probably a reflection of the fact that this is an important week for Mr. Cohen, as a federal judge will decide whether to accept or reject SAC’s guilty plea to insider trading charges. The hearing on Thursday before Judge Laura Taylor Swain of the United States District Court in Manhattan may move Mr. Cohen one step closer to putting the federal government’s nearly decade-long investigation of his firm behind him.

“But whether Point72 will be able to replicate the kind of trading success that SAC generated over its 22-year history will depend a lot on whether the investigation of Mr. Cohen and his firm has really come to an end. Another significant arrest of a top trader who once worked for SAC could make it impossible for the Wall Street banks that continue to lend money to Point72 to continue those relationships,” Mr. Goldstein writes.

ON THE AGENDA  |  The Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey comes out at 10 a.m. Narayana Kocherlakota, president of the Minneapolis Fed, gives a speech at 1:30 p.m. Charles I. Plosser, president of the Philadelphia Fed, speaks on prudential regulation at 2:45 p.m. in Philadelphia. Charles L. Evans, president of the Chicago Fed, sits on a panel at 4 p.m. to discuss fiscal policy. The House Committee on Financial Services holds a hearing at 10 a.m. entitled “Who’s in Your Wallet: Examining How Washington Red Tape Impairs Economic Freedom.” The Senate Budget Committee holds a hearing at 10:30 a.m. to examine supporting broad-based economic growth and fiscal responsibility through a fairer tax code.

EQUITY FUND BUYS MATZO MAKER  |  The Manischewitz Company, whose matzo and gefilte fish are staples of Seder tables around the world, is expected to announce on Tuesday that it has been sold to Sankaty Advisors, an arm of the private equity giant Bain Capital, William Alden writes in DealBook. The deal comes just in time for Passover, which begins next week, and may help the 126-year-old company expand beyond the kosher aisle. The price of the deal has not been disclosed.

Manischewitz has bounced around various owners over the last two decades. Under its new owner, the company is expected to promote “kosher” as a quality-control designation, rather than simply a religious one. The company estimates that roughly 60 percent of its products are now sold in kosher aisles of supermarkets. But by introducing new products and relying on more mainstream foods like sardines and soup, it hopes to shift that balance. Manischewitz is also trying to capitalize on the craze for pure and healthy food, including by offering gluten-free items.

 

Mergers & Acquisitions »

Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals to Buy Questcor for $5.6 Billion  |  Questcor Pharmaceuticals has been criticized for steadily raising the price of its most valuable product, but that aggressive pricing strategy appears to have paid off for the drug maker. DealBook »

Deal for Questcor May Create More Headaches for Acquirer  |  Mallinckrodt’s deal to buy Questcor gives the company a tax advantage, but the company it is buying is barraged by regulatory inquiries, Robert Cyran of Reuters Breakingviews writes. DealBook »

Antitrust Hurdles Loom Large for Giant Cement Merger  |  Holcim of Switzerland and Lafarge of France will need to persuade regulators in 15 jurisdictions that they are prepared to reduce overlap in regions where their combined market concentration reduces competition. DealBook »

China’s Dominance in Cement Has Little Effect on European Suppliers  |  Cement is heavy to transport and relatively inexpensive to produce, so China’s dominance in the industry has little bearing on global supplies or prices. DEALBOOK

Laclede to Buy Alabama Gas Corp. in $1.6 Billion Deal  |  With its purchase of the Alabama Gas Corporation, Laclede will own the biggest natural gas utility in the state and make its first big move outside its home state of Missouri. DealBook »

Drug Sale Shows Risk in Japan’s M.&A. Adventures  |  Sun Pharmaceutical should have a better chance of getting a grip on Ranbaxy, though it is hardly getting a steal, Peter Thal Larsen of Reuters Breakingviews writes. DealBook »

INVESTMENT BANKING »

Diamond Taps Barclays Executive to Head Atlas Mara  |  Robert E. Diamond Jr., a former chief executive of Barclays, has appointed John Vitalo, the Barclays chief executive for the Middle East and North Africa since 2009, as group chief executive at Atlas Mara Co-Nvest, which is focused on investing in the African financial sector. DealBook »

JPMorgan to Shift Executives at Corporate and Investment Bank  |  Daniel E. Pinto, who two weeks ago became sole chief executive of JPMorgan Chase’s corporate and investment bank, has announced a number of executive shifts within his division. DealBook »

Banks Take Annual Meetings Far From Home  |  Many of the biggest American banks, which once held their annual meetings in New York or other metropolitan headquarters, are now moving to smaller venues, The Financial Times writes. FINANCIAL TIMES

Former Banker Turns to Progressive Politics  |  Gus Christensen was an investment banker until four months ago. But the former JPMorgan Chase derivatives trader and Goldman Sachs banker is now running a campaign for New York State Assembly and wants to raise taxes on the rich, Max Abelson of Bloomberg News writes. BLOOMBERG NEWS

PRIVATE EQUITY »

Warburg Pincus Takes Majority Stake in Aviation Technology Firm  |  The private equity firm Warburg Pincus will acquire a stake in mercator, an information technology services provider to the airline industry, from a unit of the Emirates Group, which will retain a minority stake in the business. DealBook »

Amid Bids for Deoleo, Spain’s Government Seeks to Protect Olive Oil Sector  |  At least three foreign bidders submitted offers last week for Deoleo, Spain’s biggest olive oil company, but the national government is warning any buyer against reducing focus on Spanish olive oil farming. DealBook »

Sheridan Healthcare Prepares for I.P.O.  |  Sheridan Healthcare, which is owned by the private equity firm Hellman & Friedman, has hired Credit Suisse, Barclays and Goldman Sachs to lead its initial public offering, The Wall Street Journal reports, citing unidentified people familiar with the situation. The offering may raise $400 million to $500 million and could value the company at more than $2 billion. WALL STREET JOURNAL

Inflated Private Equity Fees Said to Have Been Found by S.E.C.  |  A majority of private equity firms inflate fees and expenses charged to companies in which they hold stakes, according to an internal review by the Securities and Exchange Commission, Bloomberg News reports, citing an unidentified person familiar with the situation. More than half of about 400 firms examined by the S.E.C. have charged unjustified fees and expenses without notifying investors. BLOOMBERG NEWS

HEDGE FUNDS »

Highbridge Capital Hires a Trader in London  |  The hedge fund Highbridge Capital Management, which recently hired away two portfolio managers from Steven A. Cohen, has recruited a portfolio manager in London from Claren Road Asset Management, a division of the Carlyle Group. DealBook »

Paulson’s Advantage Plus Fund Said to Have Fallen 7.4% in March  |  The Paulson Advantage Plus Fund is said to have dropped 7.4 percent in March, hurt in part by losses in the gold market, Reuters reports, citing unidentified people familiar with the situation. REUTERS

I.P.O./OFFERINGS »

Rough First Day of Trading for Lands’ End, and Its Former Parent  |  Shares in Lands’ End tumbled in their debut on Monday, falling 6.7 percent, and Sears Holdings’ shares also declined. DealBook »

I.P.O. Market Expects Busiest Week Since 2007  |  A total of 14 initial public offerings listed in the United States are scheduled to price through Thursday night, The Wall Street Journal reports. WALL STREET JOURNAL

Marketing Software Company Yodle Selects Banks for I.P.O.  |  Yodle, a marketing software company, has selected Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank to lead the process for an initial public offering that is expected to come later this year, Reuters reports, citing unidentified people familiar with the situation. The I.P.O. could raise $100 million. REUTERS

Floor & Decor’s Owners Planning I.P.O.  |  The private equity firms Ares International and Freeman Spogli are planning an initial public offering of the home improvement retailer Floor & Decor for later this year, Reuters reports, citing unidentified people familiar with the situation. REUTERS

VENTURE CAPITAL »

Fenway Summer Acquires Start-Up Mortgage Lender  |  A firm started by Raj Date, a former official at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, plans to start making home loans in the next few months. DealBook »

Silicon Valley Pours Funds Into Education Technology  |  “Education technology start-ups attracted $1.25 billion in funding in 2013, according to analysis by CB Insights, and the boom has grown in 2014, with education technology companies attracting nearly half that amount ($559 million) during the first quarter alone,” John McDuling writes in Quartz. QUARTZ

The Cautionary Tale of Better Place  |  The Israeli start-up Better Place had almost $1 billion in funding and ambitions to replace petroleum-based cars with a fleet of cheap electric vehicles, Max Chafkin writes in Fast Company. So why did the company fail? FAST COMPANY

LEGAL/REGULATORY »

Citigroup to Pay $1.13 Billion to Settle Securities Claims  |  The pact reached with 18 institutional investors called for the bank to make a binding offer to the trustees of 68 trusts it sponsored that bundled some $59.4 billion in home loans. DealBook »

Puerto Rico Hires Bankruptcy Lawyers  |  The move by the Government Development Bank, which oversees all of the commonwealth’s debt deals, raises the specter that Puerto Rico is preparing to revamp its finances. DealBook »

In Scrutiny of Comcast Merger, Internet Choice Will Be Crucial  |  Comcast’s position that there will be no diminution of cable TV competition in its proposed takeover of Time Warner Cable may be beside the point, Edward Wyatt writes in The New York Times. NEW YORK TIMES

Fed Gives Banks Extension for Part of Volcker Rule  |  The Federal Reserve said on Monday that it would give banks two more years to ensure that their collateralized loan obligations do not fall under the Volcker Rule’s ban on speculative investments, The Wall Street Journal reports. WALL STREET JOURNAL

‘Flash Boys’ Fuels More Calls for a Tax on Trading  |  Michael Lewis’s new book “Flash Bots” has revived a fan club for new taxes, especially among economists and legal experts, Nelson D. Schwartz writes in The New York Times. NEW YORK TIMES

High-Frequency Trading Falls in the Cracks of Criminal Law  |  What the high-frequency trading firms are doing does not fit comfortably into any of the typical theories of securities fraud, Peter J. Henning writes in the White Collar Watch column. DealBook »

Box Chief Invests in Supply Chain Software Company

Aaron Levie, the chief executive of Box, is preparing to take his cloud storage company public.

But at the same time, he says he has identified the next new thing in technology.

Mr. Levie has joined other technology entrepreneurs in a $5 million financing round in Elementum, a start-up that makes cloud-based software for supply chain management

, the company announced on Tuesday. The investment follows a $44 million institutional round that Elementum announced in February after spinning off from Flextronics, a publicly traded supply chain company.

With the new money, Elementum says it has a valuation of $225 million. That amounts to a big bet that the company can attract more business customers with its slick set of apps.

“It seems like the absolute perfect time for the supply chain, and manufacturing broadly, to have the same move to the cloud that other industries have gone through,” Mr. Levie said in a recent interview. He compared Elementum to Workday, a cloud-based software company for human resources that has soared since its initial public offering in 2012.

David Duffield, the co-founder and co-chief executive of Workday, is among the investors in the latest financing round, as is Jerry Yang, the Yahoo co-founder. Jim Davidson, the co-founder of the private equity firm Silver Lake, who is a member of Elementum’s board, is also investing.

With customers like Dyson, the vacuum maker, and Enphase, a company that makes technology for solar power, Elementum says it can improve the efficiency of supply chains and reduce costs. Its software lets businesses see graphical displays of their supply chain to identity any weak links and, Elementum says, get products out more quickly.

The company says it has 15 customers, more than double the number at this time last year. It would not disclose the revenue it makes from selling its software products.

Nader Mikhail, the chief executive, was formerly an executive at Flextronics, where he was asked to find innovative ways to improve supply chain management. He got seed funding from Flextronics to run Elementum as an independent unit within the company, ultimately spinning it off late last year. Flextronics, he says, is also a customer.

“We want to be the Workday of supply chain,” Mr. Mikhail said. “Or the Box of supply chain.”

Warburg Pincus Takes Majority Stake in Aviation Tech Firm

LONDON - The private equity firm Warburg Pincus said Thursday that it had acquired a majority stake in mercator, a information technology services provider to the airline industry.

Warburg will acquire the stake from dnata, a unit of Emirates Group, which will retain a minority stake in the business. Terms of the deal and the size of the stake were not disclosed.

Based in Dubai, Mercator provides technology services to help airlines manage cargo operation, passenger reservations, loyalty programs, safety protocols and their finances.

The company’s products are used by 125 airlines in more than 80 countries worldwide, including United Continental Holdings, JetBlue Airways and British Airways.

“We view it as an excellent platform to build a market-leading transport, travel and logistics business of scale,” Joseph Schull, a Warburg Pincus managing director, said in a statement. “We look forward to building on the expertise of the mercator staff to accelerate the company’s growth.”

David Tibble will serve as mercator’s executive chairman following the deal.

Mr. Tibble was the former executive chairman of WNS Global Services, a provider of process management solutions that Warburg helped establish following a carve-out from British Airways in 2002. Mr. Tibble was most recently an executive-in-residence at Warburg.

Founded in 1966, Warburg Pincus has more than $37 billion in asset under management.

Diamond Taps Barclays Executive to Head Atlas Mara

LONDON - Robert E. Diamond Jr., the former chief executive of Barclays, did not have to look far to choose the top executive of his new investment company, Atlas Mara Co-Nvest.

Atlas Mara, which is focused on  investments in the African financial sector, said Tuesday that it had appointed John Vitalo, chief executive for the Middle East and North Africa at Barclays since 2009, as group chief executive.

“He is a business builder, deeply knowledgeable in the critical areas of technology and risk, and he is trusted by his colleagues and clients,” Mr. Diamond said in a statement.

Between 2005 and 2009, Mr. Vitalo was chief of Absa Capital, a pan-African investment bank and an affiliate of Barclays Capital.

The news comes just days after Atlas Mara agreed to a second investment in Africa, reaching a nonbinding memorandum of understanding to privatize the commercial arm of the state-owned Development Bank of Rwanda.

Last week, Atlas Mara said it would take a majority stake in ABC Holdings, which operates the African bank BancABC, and would acquire its controlling shareholder, the ADC African Development Corporation, for about $265 million in cash and shares.

Mr. Diamond co-founded Atlas Mara with Ashish J. Thakkar, the entrepreneur behind Mara Group, which has technology, manufacturing and real estate interests in 19 African countries.