TEL AVIV | Wed Jan 2, 2013 7:32am EST

TEL AVIV (Reuters) - Leading Chinese companies are looking for investments in Israeli technology to help boost their growth and development, similar to what U.S. companies have done in the past two decades.

A delegation of senior Chinese business leaders visited Israel last month in search of opportunities, pressing ahead with the trip despite rockets that fell in the commercial centre of the country during fighting with Gaza militants.

The delegation, led by Ronnie Chan, chairman of investment holding company Hang Lung Group, included the heads of Lenovo Group, China's top grains trader COFCO, investment banking and private equity firm Hina Group, China Merchants Bank and JP Morgan Chase in China.

Chan noted that many technologies in applications and products from companies such as Google and Intel originated in Israel, and Chinese companies would like to explore similar ventures.

"The sky is the limit," Chan told Reuters. "Some companies can set up research and development centers here, some can bring Israeli companies to China, some can open up the Chinese market for Israeli companies. I have no idea where this will lead."

Chan, a property magnate, said his family business owns technology companies around the world but has no investments in Israel.

Lenovo's operations in Israel had been limited to sales and support, but the company recently made its first technology investment, for an undisclosed amount, in venture capital firm Vertex.

"Definitely we are interested in Israel's technology, to grow our company, to grow our business," Chief Executive Yang Yuanqing said, adding that the investment in Vertex was just a first step.

Lenovo, which is on track to become the world's No. 1 PC maker, is interested in information and mobile technology.

Bilateral trade between China and Israel totaled $8 billion in 2011, according to Israel's Foreign Ministry.

Chinese have invested $3 billion in Israeli companies to date. The biggest investment was the $1.4 billion acquisition of 60 percent of MA Industries, the world's largest maker of generic crop protection chemicals, by China National Chemical Corp (ChemChina) in late 2011.

"Since 2010, we saw for the first time significant Chinese investments in the real economy in Israel - in traditional industries like MA Industries and also in the high-tech sector, in biotechnology and agrotechnology," Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz told Reuters.

Edouard Cukierman, managing partner of private equity funds Catalyst Investments, which organized the delegation's trip to Israel with the Foreign Ministry, said the visit by the Chinese companies could lead to acquisitions, investments in research and development centers and even the establishment of their own local operations.

"We are following up with each one of them, preparing specific action plans for each one of them," Cukierman said. "They believe they can benefit from innovation in Israel more than the Americans did."

Catalyst Partners is establishing a $100 million China-Israel technology fund that is expected to close in the first half of 2013. Cukierman hopes to eventually reach $200 million.

(Additional reporting by Steven Scheer)

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KANO, Nigeria | Sat Dec 22, 2012 7:08am EST

KANO, Nigeria (Reuters) - Two suicide car bombers attacked the offices of two mobile phone operators on Saturday in Nigeria's northern city of Kano, killing themselves but no civilians, police said.

India's Airtel and South Africa's MTN were the targets.

Islamist sect Boko Haram has previously blown up telephone masts and offices of phone companies, saying they help the security forces catch its members.

"The one who hit the Airtel office was shot by military men before the bomb exploded ... at the MTN office the car rammed into the fence but no civilians were killed," Ibrahim Idris, the chief of police in Kano, told Reuters. Both bombs went off.

A military source said one security guard was injured and has been taken to hospital.

MTN and Airtel Nigeria's parent company Bharti Airtel, India's top cellphone operator, gave no immediate comment.

The national emergency agency confirmed the bombings and said it was not aware of any civilian casualties. The security forces have played down the death toll in previous bombings.

At least 2,800 people have died in fighting in the largely Muslim north since Boko Haram launched an uprising against the government in 2009, watchdog Human Rights Watch says.

The sect wants to impose strict Islamic law on a country of 160 million people split roughly equally between Christians and Muslims.

The group has previously targeted churches on Christmas Day and security has been increased in all the major northern cities, although security experts say given the scale of Christian worship in Nigeria they cannot protect everyone.

Kano, Nigeria's second-largest city after the southern commercial hub Lagos, was the site of Boko Haram's deadliest attack which killed at least 186 people in January in coordinated bombings and shootings.

Armed police have been guarding major churches in Kano this week and additional police checkpoints have been set up around the majority-Muslim city, a Reuters witness said.

Police in Kano said this week that their anti-terrorism squads have been searching houses and buildings they suspect to be hideouts of criminals and "terrorists".

Security experts say they believe Boko Haram is seeking to spark a religious conflict by targeting Christians in a country where ethnic violence has flared up periodically in recent years, in some cases killing hundreds in the space of hours.

A French national was kidnapped in far northern Nigeria, close to the border with Niger, this week by people France's intelligence agency said were "an organised group linked to a terrorist activity".

(Additional reporting by Isaac Abrak in Kaduna, Kaustubh Kulkarni in Mumbai and Pascal Fletcher in Johannesburg; Writing by Joe Brock; Editing by Richard Meares)

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Sat Oct 13, 2012 12:45pm EDT

n">(Reuters) - Shareholder lawyers may have embarrassed just about every top executive in the U.S. private equity industry with allegations of a wide conspiracy to rig deal prices during last decade's buyout boom, but proving their case will be a different matter.

Legal experts say much of the alleged collusion outlined in the antitrust lawsuit may have been nothing more than firms working together in perfectly acceptable ways to spread the risk of taking on a big investment. The practice, they say, allowed the investment firms to pursue the largest deals and offer premiums to shareholders.

A lack of action by the U.S. Department of Justice in a parallel antitrust investigation could also suggest there are few grounds to go after the industry. That probe dates to 2006, according to the lawsuit and regulatory filings from some private equity firms.

"If these allegations are true, and if the DOJ has been investigating since 2006, one wonders then why didn't the DOJ do anything?" said Maurice Stucke, a former Justice Department antitrust prosecutor who is now a professor at the University of Tennessee College of Law.

The Justice Department declined to comment.

The Boston federal judge overseeing the case released a mostly unredacted version of the complaint this week. The defendants had objected, arguing that competitive information about deals should remain blacked out from public view.

One exchange appears particularly revealing. According to the lawsuit, Blackstone Group LP President Tony James wrote in an email to KKR & Co co-founder George Roberts: "We would much rather work with you guys than against you. Together we can be unstoppable but in opposition we can cost each other a lot of money."

Roberts, the lawsuit said, replied later that day: "Agreed."

The emails were allegedly sent after KKR decided to step down in the $17.6 billion bidding for semiconductor company Freescale in 2006. A group led by Blackstone eventually won.

Blackstone, KKR and Roberts declined to comment. James did not return a call for comment.

Many lawsuits contain snippets of emails or other conversations involving defendants, and legal experts note that such excerpts may not tell the whole story.

In one instance, the plaintiffs accuse KKR of having "bragged" to its investors in 2005 that "Gone are the days when buy-out firms fought each other with the ferocity of cornered cats to win a deal."

But those words were not KKR's. The firm cited this sentence, which originally appeared in a March 31, 2005, article in The Economist magazine, in a presentation to investors discussing the trend of so-called club deals in which buyout firms pursue acquisitions together, according to KKR spokeswoman Kristi Huller. She said the quote was a bullet point in the presentation and was clearly cited as being from the magazine.

Chris Burke, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said it was not misleading to include the KKR presentation in the lawsuit without more explanation.

"Was it lifted out of context? No," said Burke, of law firm Scott + Scott. "Was it out of an Economist article? Sure."

PRICE-RIGGING ALLEGATIONS

In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs contend that KKR, Blackstone, Bain Capital Partners LLC, the Carlyle Group and others conspired to suppress prices of takeover targets, hurting shareholders in many companies purchased in the deal boom between 2003 and 2007.

Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate and a Bain founder, left that firm in 1999, before the transactions in question. He is not named in the complaint.

In one email cited prominently in the opening pages of the complaint, Silver Lake Partners co-founder Glenn Hutchins seemingly anticipated that his fund would participate in rivals' future deals after bringing a half dozen others into the 2005 buyout of SunGard Data Systems.

"We invited you into Sun(G)ard and have a reasonable expectation of your reciprocating," Hutchins wrote to Blackstone's James, according to the complaint.

Silver Lake and Hutchins declined to comment.

Legal experts say email exchanges among top executives at rival firms do not necessarily mean collusion. While firms competed on smaller deals, they were increasingly working together to spread the risk of larger buyouts and needed to talk to one another, experts said.

The evidence in the emails "is pretty thin gruel," said Hays Gorey, a partner with the GeyerGorey law firm and a former Justice Department antitrust prosecutor.

"Without proof that each conspirator 'got something,' it's simply not believable that they were joint actors," said Gorey, who is not involved in the lawsuit.

The case, filed in 2007, seeks class-action status. Suits by several pension funds and individual shareholders were combined, and after being allowed to move forward, the plaintiffs updated the complaint with the fruits of their investigations into 11 private equity firms.

Burke, the plaintiffs' attorney, said substantial evidence of collusion has been uncovered and noted that the judge allowed him to expand his investigation to 27 deals, up from nine initially.

In every deal, he said, no rival ever offered a counter bid once a target company's board accepted a written offer from a buyout firm.

"It's a complete absence of competition. That's thin gruel?"

A trial could be at least a year away. Assuming the case survives summary judgment, a move by defendants to get a case thrown out before trial, Burke said the next hurdle likely would be a fight to formally recognize the case as a class action.

The buyout firms potentially could be on the hook to compensate the selling shareholders for what they should have received in a competitive auction.

In some antitrust cases, plaintiffs can receive three times the damages they suffered. The plaintiffs claim that the 2006 buyout of hospital chain HCA alone was depressed by $1 billion due to the alleged collusion.

It may be harder to make similar claims on other deals, such as the $45 billion takeover of power company TXU. In that deal, a consortium of KKR, TPG Capital, Goldman Sachs Group Inc's private equity arm and others teamed up, agreeing to pay a premium of more than 20 percent for the company.

"Many of these deals could not have been done by one firm individually, you need to pool the firms together," said University of Chicago Professor of Finance Steven Kaplan.

KKR has taken significant writedowns on the TXU acquisition, the largest buyout in history. Even if the plaintiffs prove collusion on the deal, they may not be able to prove damages, said Robert Miller, a law professor at the University of Iowa.

(Reporting By Tom Hals in Wilmington, Delaware, and Mike Erman in New York; Additional reporting by Nate Raymond in New York; Editing by Martha Graybow and Eric Beech)

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NEW YORK | Thu Sep 27, 2012 4:01pm EDT

NEW YORK (Reuters) - With increased regulatory scrutiny of complex exchange-traded funds and exchange-traded notes, big brokerage firms are taking longer to make them available to financial advisers, according to speakers at SIFMA's Complex Products Forum.

In some cases, the firms have decided that the time it would take to conduct due diligence on complex ETFs, or even a mutual fund, is not worth the effort, said Paul Weisenfeld, managing director of funds at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, in a panel discussion at the forum on Thursday.

This means that financial advisers - and many of their clients - may not be able to access more sophisticated products or, at the very least, will have to wait several months before they can buy them.

"It used to be that once a product got a ticker everyone could get it," said one conference attendee who declined to be named because he was not permitted by his employer to speak to the press. "Now the firm blocks the ticker until they approve it for sale."

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority in recent years have stepped up their focus on complex ETFs, such as leveraged and inverse exchange traded-funds, as well as exchange-traded notes.

Leveraged and inverse ETFs are designed to amplify short-term returns by using debt and derivatives while exchange-traded notes are debt securities issued by banks.

The number of ETFs and ETNs has jumped over the years, with 1,454 ETFs, 205 of which are exchange-traded notes, now on the market, according to Morningstar.

Given the increase in the number of these products being launched, brokerage firms have to spend more time than ever doing due diligence, brokerage firm executives on the panel said.

Some products might not get approved because the firm simply has not had time yet to review them properly, said Robert Forsyth, director, exchange traded products at UBS Financial Services.

"At UBS we block many products because they are too new and we haven't had a chance to review them," he said in the panel discussion. "With so many new products coming out, we just don't have the time or manpower to review all of the products."

The due diligence applies both to the firms' own products as well as those created by other providers, Forsyth said.

For example, the investment banking arm of UBS offers a number of volatility-based exchange-traded notes, none of which UBS allows its own financial advisers to sell, Forsyth said after the panel discussion.

For those products that do pass muster, the brokerages still set restrictions on who can buy them.

UBS and Wells Fargo & Co, for example, have built systems to help assure that more complex products are only available to suitable clients.

UBS' classification system takes into account a number of criteria, such as an investors' risk tolerance, income, total net worth, when deciding which investors can have access to complex products. The system has more than 20 criteria.

"You can have a very unsophisticated investor with a huge net worth, so you need to look at a variety of factors," Forsyth said.

Wells Fargo has a system created to restrict sales of certain products to only clients that have a relevant investment objective, said Dan Moorman, senior vice president, of mutual funds, ETFs and unit investment trusts at Wells Fargo Advisors, the brokerage arm of Wells Fargo, in the panel discussion.

Similarly, the firm has enhanced its systems so that when certain types of orders come in, the client receives disclosures about the potential risks of those complex products, he said.

For smaller brokerage firms, the increased due diligence on complex products can be a particular challenge, said one wirehouse executive who spoke anonymously because he is not allowed to speak to the press.

"FINRA holds every broker dealer accountable," he said.

In opening remarks at the conference, FINRA Chief Executive Richard Ketchum said the agency is looking closely at how firms sell complex products, with a particular focus on potential conflict of interest and training.

(Reporting By Jessica Toonkel; Editing by M.D. Golan)

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Tourists take pictures of a NASA sign at the Kennedy Space Center visitors complex in Cape Canaveral, Florida April 14, 2010.

PASADENA, California (Reuters) - PASADENA | Fri Aug 3, 2012 8:04pm EDT

PASADENA, California (Reuters) - PASADENA Calif. Aug 3 (Reuters) - NASA will pay more than $1 billion over the next 21 months to three companies to develop commercial spaceships capable of flying astronauts to the International Space Station, the agency said Friday.

The lion's share of the $1.1 billion allotted for the next phase of NASA's so-called ?"Commercial Crew" program will be split between Boeing and Space Exploration Technologies, a privately held firm run by Internet entrepreneur Elon Musk.

Boeing will receive $460 million to continue developing its CST-100 capsule, which is intended to fly aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket. ULA is a partnership of Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, was awarded $440 million to upgrade its Dragon cargo capsule, which flies on the firm's Falcon 9 rocket, to carry people.

In May, a Dragon capsule became the first privately owned spacecraft to reach the station, a $100 billion outpost that flies 240 miles above Earth. The test flight was part of a related NASA program to hire commercial companies to fly cargo to the station.

Privately held Sierra Nevada Corp received a partial award of $212.5 million for work on its Dream Chaser, a winged vehicle that resembles a miniature space shuttle which also launches on an Atlas 5 rocket.

All three firms are prior recipients of NASA space taxi development work. The new awards will more than triple NASA's investments in commercial crew programs, which so far total $365 million.

Unlike previous NASA development programs, costs are shared between the government and its selected partners.

"?The companies also are bringing money to the table. This is a way of allowing the United States to lead in the development of new space systems that are human-capability and then taking those systems for commercial purposes, as well as for NASA purposes in the future," program manager Ed Mango said.

Since the space shuttles were retired last year, NASA is dependent on partners Russia, Europe and Japan to reach the station. Russia will remain the sole entity capable of flying crew until U.S. companies develop systems, which NASA hopes will be within five years.

Shut out of the competition was Alliant Techsystems which hoped to parlay an ongoing unfunded NASA partnership agreement into a paying contract.

Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos's startup Blue Origin, which won $25.7 million during two predecessor programs, did not bid for the integrated design contracts awarded Friday.

Three other firms - Space Operations, American Aerospace and Space Design - submitted proposals but were eliminated for not meeting requirements, NASA's associate administrator for space operations Bill Gerstenmaier said during a conference call with reporters.

(Irene.Klotz@thomsonreuters.com)

(Editing by Vicki Allen)

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