Acquisitions

Spiegel Inc., a catalog retailer under the Eddie Bauer, Newport News and its namesake brands, said it plans to buy the Clifford & Wills women's clothing catalog from closely held J. Crew Group Inc. to boost sales. Terms of the sale were not disclosed. The transaction would include the Clifford & Wills name, a U.S. customer list and a Web site, the company said. Spiegel is seeking to buy brands or form partnerships this year to boost sales and profit.

The Kings were five points out of a playoff spot and stood a wobbly 11th in the Western Conference on Dec. 22, the day Darryl Sutter made his debut as their coach. The team he took over was flailing. General Manager Dean Lombardi thought he had acquired the final pieces for a contender six months earlier when he traded for center Mike Richards and signed free-agent winger Simon Gagne, but the offense was sputtering. Coach Terry Murray's defense-oriented foundation had become the team's ceiling, leaving no room for skill or creativity.

In London this fall, art critics piled on the superlatives. In New York this winter, crowds braved the cold to line up outside Paula Cooper Gallery and get a look. Now Angelenos will have their chance to see Christian Marclay's video-art hit "The Clock," which the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has just purchased as part of an annual fundraising and collecting event. Through this event, known as Collectors Committee Weekend, LACMA acquired eight artworks for roughly $2.7 million.

Google finalized its acquisition of Motorola Mobility, announcing the news in a blog post Tuesday morning. The post, written by Google CEO Larry Page, marked the end of a long process that began in August when the $12.5-billion deal was announced. "Motorola is a great American tech company that has driven the mobile revolution, with a track record of over 80 years of innovation, including the creation of the first cell phone," Page wrote.

Ending months of speculation about its future, mortgage lending giant DiTech Funding Corp. of Irvine said Monday it agreed to be acquired by GMAC Mortgage Corp., a unit of General Motors Corp. Terms weren't disclosed. DiTech, one of the Southland's largest mortgage lenders and an aggressive marketer of higher-risk home-equity loans, shelved an initial public stock offering last fall. It had hoped the IPO would raise about $110 million for a minority stake in the company.

Venerable commercial real estate brokerage Grubb & Ellis Co. will sell its assets to the parent company of rival Newmark Knight Frank as part of a prepackaged bankruptcy, the firms said Tuesday. BGC Partners Inc., a New York financial services firm that acquired Newmark Knight Frank in October, agreed to buy essentially all the assets of Grubb & Ellis for an undisclosed price. Grubb & Ellis will conduct its asset sale under Section 363 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code and has commenced Chapter 11 proceedings in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York.

The sale of IndyMac Federal Bank was concluded Thursday, and the new owners wasted no time in ditching its tainted name. Starting today, IndyMac is OneWest Bank. The Pasadena bank's new owners, organized under OneWest Bank Group, bought the bank's $20.7 billion in loans and other assets for $16 billion. That includes $9 billion in financing from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Federal Home Loan Bank. For IndyMac customers it will be business as usual.

What a difference a year makes. With the virtual collapse of credit markets and the drying up of money from private equity firms, 2008 turned out to be a very slow year for mergers and acquisitions. Globally, there were 37,445 deals, totaling $3.3 trillion, down 29% from record volume in 2007, according to Dealogic, a data research firm in New York. In the United States the value of deals dropped 29% to $1.1 trillion.

AT&T Corp. completed its purchase of MediaOne Group Inc. for about $44 billion, becoming the largest U.S. cable television provider serving more than 40% of pay-TV customers. The acquisition was completed for about $23 billion in cash and 606 million shares worth $20.3 billion, based on AT&T's closing share price Wednesday, the company said. That's far lower than the $58-billion value when the deal was announced in April 1999.

In an effort to jump-start its long-struggling commercial coffee operations, Farmer Bros. Co. has agreed to acquire the Superior Coffee brand and sales network, almost doubling the size of its business. Both brands are served throughout Southern California in restaurants, mini-marts, hotels and institutional food establishments such as hospitals. The $45-million purchase from food giant Sara Lee Corp. would give Torrance-based Farmer Bros.

Collective Brands Inc., which owns footwear brands such as Sperry Top-Sider and Keds as well as the retailer Payless ShoeSource, will be split in two by multiple buyers in a purchase valued at $2 billion, including debt. Wolverine Worldwide, Blum Capital and Golden Gate Capital formed an acquisition company to buy Collective for $21.75 a share. The deal was unanimously approved by Collective's board and is expected to close by early in the fourth quarter. The price represents a 104% premium on Collective's 30-day average stock price before Aug. 24, when the company first announced that it was looking into a strategic and financial shift for its operations.

Lionsgate has solved one of the thorniest staffing problems resulting from its acquisition of "Twilight" studio Summit Entertainment by keeping the marketing chiefs from both studios. Tim Palen, Lionsgate's chief marketing officer who is coming off the blockbuster success of "The Hunger Games," has signed a new deal that will keep him in his job through 2015. However, the studio is also keeping Summit's marketing president, Nancy Kirkpatrick, in her current job as president of marketing for the studio, which is now a Lionsgate label.

The European Union's antitrust regulators have approved Sony Corp.'s $2.2-billion acquisition of EMI's publishing business, clearing a major hurdle in Sony's ambition to create the world's largest music publishing group with rights to about 2 million songs, including some by David Bowie, Stevie Wonder and Pink. The deal announced Thursday still needs to clear U.S. regulators, who have historically been more lenient than their European counterparts. Nevertheless, antitrust experts cautioned against celebrating too soon.

Toy giant Mattel Inc.reported a 53% decline in profit in the first quarter, sending its stock down more than 9%, after higher production costs, slower sales of Barbie and Hot Wheels and a recent acquisition affected its bottom line. For the three months ended March 31, sales totaled $928.4 million, down 2% compared with $951.9 million in the same quarter last year, the company said Monday. Profit dropped to $7.8 million, or 2 cents a share, from $16.6 million, or 5 cents. The results fell below analyst expectations of a profit of 7 cents a share.

Former executives of office landlord MPG Office Trust Inc. have launched their own property company with the purchase of a landmark Los Angeles office building. Nelson and Christopher Rising of Rising Realty Partners expect their acquisition of Pacific Center at 6th and Olive streets to close Monday. Terms of the purchase from Alliance Commercial Partners were not revealed, but experts familiar with downtown real estate prices value the deal at $60 million. The new owners will change the name of the complex to the PacMutual Building, in keeping with origins of the Beaux Arts-style complex that can be traced to railroad tycoons Charles Crocker, Leland Stanford and Mark Hopkins.

Troubled film financier David Bergstein has sued the owners of Miramax, alleging that they denied him money and an equity stake owed for his role in the acquisition of the film label from Walt Disney Co. in 2010. The suit, filed Monday in Los Angeles Superior Court by the law firm Weingarten Brown, contends that Bergstein — who has been involved in dozens of lawsuits, many related to his activities in the film business — played a crucial role in the deal to acquire Miramax. It asserts that Santa Monica private equity firm Colony Capital, one of Miramax's new owners, and its principal Richard Nanula conspired to deny Bergstein a $6.1-million fee and 3.3% stake they agreed to provide him as part of the purchase.

Germany's Deutsche Bank is in talks to buy Bankers Trust Corp., three executives familiar with the discussions said, in a deal that would be worth more than $8 billion--and would be the largest foreign takeover of a U.S. financial firm. The purchase, which has been rumored for the last month and could be announced today, would give Germany's biggest bank control of the eighth-largest U.S.

Despite the Bass family's reputation for shaking up companies in which they invest, Beckman Instruments officials said Wednesday that they "welcomed" the disclosure that the wealthy Texans had acquired a 5.3% stake in the medical instruments maker. An investment group led by the Basses bought its Beckman shares for investment purposes and has "had, and expects to continue to have, discussions with management . . .

SAN FRANCISCO - In its biggest acquisition, Facebook is paying $1 billion for the hugely popular Instagram mobile photo-sharing app maker in a move that broadens its business and absorbs a potential rival. The tiny San Francisco startup has just 13 employees and no significant revenue. But its acquisition helps ensure that Facebook - on the verge of staging the most hotly anticipated initial public stock offering in years - will be on the forefront of how people share photos with friends on their smartphones.

The new Dodgers ownership team was supposed to hold an introductory news conference in New York on Wednesday, but when my phone rang around mid-morning, it was Magic Johnson saying it had been canceled. "C'mon, this is a Los Angeles team, our first appearance has to be in front of the people of Los Angeles," he said. A good start, I think. What ensued was a 20-minute conversation with the three main players in the $2.15-billion deal, all of them sitting around a New York conference room after having not slept the previous night, all of them still excited enough to raise their voices and emphasize their hopes.