Good morning on this post-holiday Monday.

WSJ Pro's Maria Armental reports that payments company Sokin, which was backed by BlackRock earlier this year, has closed a new investment round at a $300 million valuation.

SoftBank Group's shares have swung wildly over the past months, reflecting investors' changing views on the firm's wagers on artificial intelligence, the Journal reports.

Now onto the news...

​​Growth investor Prysm Capital led a $50 million investment in Sokin that values the payments company at $300 million, betting on the growing importance of cross-border transactions to support global commerce, WSJ Pro's Maria Armental reports. Sokin’s $300 million post-money valuation rose significantly from January, when BlackRock backed a $15 million debt investment, according to founder and Chief Executive Vroon Modgill. He founded the London-based company legally named Plata Capital in 2019 to address the kind of banking difficulties that he encountered with earlier businesses, including laborious and slow transaction processes.

Investment firm SoftBank Group's volatile ride in Tokyo trading continued last week as its shares rallied Wednesday after some recent sharp declines, the Journal reports. SoftBank shares rose almost 5.7% Wednesday. Its shares had fallen about 40% last month by then after a 45% gain in October. SoftBank’s whipsawing share price likely reflects investors’ shifting sentiment about artificial intelligence and the company’s bets in the space.

Billionaire investor Todd Boehly, a part-owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, has joined the race to acquire the international assets of Lukoil, the sanctions-hit Russian energy company, the Journal reports. Eldridge Industries founder and Chief Executive Boehly and a United Arab Emirates-based investor group have formed a consortium, according to Xtellus Partners, a financial firm working with these bidders. The name of the U.A.E. investor couldn’t be learned.

Elliott Investment Management’s roughly $6 billion bid for Venezuela’s shares of Citgo Petroleum got a federal judge's approval, pushing the forced sale of the country’s prized foreign asset closer to completion, WSJ Pro's Andrew Scurria reports. Elliott's bid wasn't the highest but U.S. District Judge Leonard Stark deemed it to be the best all-around offer with the greatest certainty of closing.

Advent International in Boston has acquired Zurich-listed U-blox Holding through a public tender offer of 135 Swiss francs a share in cash in a transaction valuing the Swiss business at about $1.3 billion. The company supplies wireless communications and positioning technologies to more than 10,000 customers worldwide.

European financial services investor BlackFin Capital Partners is acquiring a majority interest in Arendt Investor Services, an arm of law firm Arendt & Medernach, to enhance the company's position in the Luxembourg market and expand into other territories. Blackfin has been investing in Luxembourg with Arendt's assistance for over a decade. Arendt is retaining a stake in the business.

A buyout offer for publicly traded dating app Grindr has collapsed as the company cited uncertainty about financing for the $18 a share proposal and research reports indicating the offer undervalued the West Hollywood, Calif.-based company. Investors George Raymond Zage III and James Fu Bin Lu, who had proposed the take-private in October, dropped the plan after receiving feedback from the company's directors, Kelly Cloonan reports for Dow Jones Newswires. Together the two investors control more than 60% of Grindr shares.

Placement agent and financial services provider Allfunds Bank is in talks to be acquired by exchange operator Deutsche Börse that would value the listed company at about €5.3 billion, or roughly $6.15 billion, according to sister publication Financial News.

A Brookfield Asset Management joint venture in Mumbai with India's Reliance Industries and developer Digital Realty plans to invest $11 billion to build data centers in the Andhra Pradesh province of India, according to multiple reports including one from the Economic Times, citing a statement from the joint venture, Digital Connexion. Construction is slated to be completed by 2030.

Brookfield and Singapore's GIC Investments have offered to buy Australia's National Storage REIT in a deal that values the self-storage site operator at $2.6 billion, David Winning reports for Dow Jones Newswires. The 2.86 Australian dollars per share bid, equivalent to $1.85 each, represents a nearly 27% premium to Tuesday's close in Sydney. The company, which is the largest self-storage provider in Australia and New Zealand with 275 sites, said it has allowed Brookfield and GIC to carry out due diligence to determine whether they will make a binding bid.

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Investcorp is selling a majority stake in business software supplier Shine to Silver Lake-backed Cegid, a cloud-based software and services provider. Based in Copenhagen, Shine's programs are used by some 400,000 smaller companies for billing, cash management and accounting. Investcorp first backed the business in 2017, investing through its Investcorp Technology Partners strategy.

Bain Capital's plan to sell more than $2 billion in memory chip maker Kioxia Holding's shares prompted a sharp fall in the Japanese company's stock Wednesday, Kosaku Narioka reports for Dow Jones Newswires. Goldman Sachs said Wednesday that it would acquire the 36 million shares of Kioxia, representing a roughly 6.7% stake, from a Bain Capital entity on Friday but might not be able to sell the Kioxia shares immediately. A group led by the firm acquired the memory-chip maker from Toshiba in 2018 for about $18 billion.

Carlyle Group has sold its nearly 60% stake in semiconductor company Ampere Computing Holdings to SoftBank Group in a transaction valued at $6.5 billion. Other sellers included affiliates of Oracle and SoftBank-backed chip designer Arm Holdings. Carlyle first invested in the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company in 2017, according to the Washington firm’s website.

Enhanced, whose backers include Peter Thiel and Donald Trump Jr., has agreed to be taken public at a $1.2 billion valuation through a Hong Kong blank-check company A Paradise Acquisition. The special purpose acquisition company raised $200 million in July, according to research provider BoardroomAlpha. Enhanced is promoting an event set for May in which athletes are permitted to use performance-juicing substances, and currently offers access to testosterone and other drugs on its website. Enhanced co-founder and Chairman Christian Angermayer is also the founder of Apeiron Investment Group, a family office which has invested in Enhanced and will have voting control of the company after the SPAC deal closes, according to PitchBook and an Enhanced presentation. Just before announcing the SPAC deal, Enhanced raised $40 million through a private offering largely from existing investors that gives them partial early releases from lock-up agreements so they can sell shares after the SPAC deal closes.

LGT Capital Partners has raised at least $1.48 billion so far for Crown Co-Investment Opportunities IV and related vehicles, a regulatory filing shows. A separate filing indicates that the firm has also amassed at least $409 million thus far for Crown U.S. Small Buyouts and related parallel funds.

Blackstone reported about $16 billion in aggregate transactional net asset value in its Blackstone Private Equity Strategies Fund, or BXPE, as of the end of October. The fund, established near the start of last year to attract capital from individual investors, had raised $2.7 billion by the end of March 2024.

Eurazeo in Paris has set up two new evergreen funds, one for debt investors and the other for private equity. The asset manager is offering its Eurazeo Prime Income Credit and Eurazeo Prime Strategic Opportunities funds to investors in Western Europe from Sweden and Austria to Italy, Spain and the U.K. Eurazeo has seeded each fund with more than €100 million in initial capital contributed by outside investors as well as the firm. Both funds are modeled after the firm's first evergreen vehicle, Eurazeo Private Value Europe 3, which Eurazeo began offering in 2018 as a debt and equity fund and now holds over €3 billion, or $3.48 billion.

Jolt Capital in Paris has collected €600 million, or $695.7 million, for Jolt Capital V and has held a first closing for the fund, which has a €1.1 billion hard cap. The participants in the vehicle include the European Investment Fund, which made a cornerstone investment of €260 million. Jolt makes growth investments from the strategy.

Capza has promoted David Schulte to head of private debt DACH and added Alexander Ball and Christopher Koch as directors to lead its senior loans strategy DACH and flex equity strategy DACH in Munich as the firm legally named Atalante expands in the German speaking regions of Europe. Partner Schulte joined the firm in 2022.

David Gentile, who started GPB Capital as a private-equity firm to invest in car dealerships and wound up in federal prison for defrauding investors, gained his release the day before Thanksgiving, government records show. In an Instagram post, President Trump's "pardon czar," Alice Marie Johnson, said she was "deeply grateful to see David Gentile heading home to his young children," with no explanation or documentation available on the website of the Justice Department's Office of the Pardon Attorney. But a Bureau of Prisons listing shows Gentile was released from custody on Nov. 26. The New York Times confirmed that Gentile had received clemency from President Trump, citing a White House official that it didn't name. Gentile and Jeffry Schneider were sentenced to seven and six years in prison, respectively, following their convictions on fraud charges in a trial last year in Brooklyn, N.Y.. They had orchestrated the biggest private-equity fraud since the collapse of Abraaj Group in 2018, collecting around $1.8 billion from roughly 17,000 investors before a federal investigation led to a suspension of fundraising in 2018.

The Federal Trade Commission said it would require Valvoline and a fund managed by advanced manufacturing-focused private equity firm Greenbriar Equity Group to divest 45 quick-lube oil change stores to resolve antitrust concerns connected to the private-equity firm’s roughly $625 million sale of Breeze Autocare. In a proposed divestiture order the regulator said that NR Automotive, referred to in the order as Main Street Auto, would acquire the oil-change units. Earlier this year, Greenbriar said it would sell Breeze Autocare, which at the time operated nearly 200 stores across 17 states predominately under the Oil Changers brand.

BlackRock, Fidelity and PanAgora Asset Management should be stripped of the New York City pension assets they manage because they failed to meet climate expectations, Bill Alpert reports for sister publication Barron's, citing city Comptroller Brad Lander. Lander made a recommendation to redistribute $42 billion managed by BlackRock and lesser sums overseen by Fidelity and hedge fund manager PanAgora in an update of his Net Zero Implementation Plan to the New York City Employees’ Retirement System, the Teachers’ Retirement System and the Board of Education Retirement System. The 46 other asset managers with city pension capital submitted plans that aligned with the city's. BlackRock Managing Director Armando Senra shot back in a letter to Lander, saying the firm had presented a detailed plan and that Lander was politicizing the handling of public pension money.

Brookfield Asset Management-backed residential solar company PosiGen sought bankruptcy protection last week after facing financial difficulties stemming from the Trump administration’s rollback of solar tax credits that hurt its ability to raise cash, WSJ Pro's Akiko Matsuda reported. The solar developer, which aimed to make photovoltaic panel leasing more affordable, got hit by a secured lender's lawsuit in October that also named Brookfield, the company's biggest credit provider. The lender, Connecticut Green Bank, alleged that Brookfield had seized control of PosiGen to protect its interests at the expense of other creditors. Brookfield has asked a judge to throw out the lawsuit.

An asset management group owned by Singapore state investment firm Temasek Holdings will integrate a private-equity firm also held by Temasek, creating a platform with around $72 billion in assets under management, Megan Cheah reports for Dow Jones Newswires. Pavilion Capital will join Seviora Group, expanding the latter's investment capabilities and growing its expertise in Asia-focused private equity. Other Temasek-backed entities such as Fullerton Fund Management and SeaTown Holdings International are also part of Seviora.

Dream Exchange, which sought to establish a marketplace to list shares of companies owned by minority entrepreneurs, had its application to run such an enterprise rejected by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Journal reported. The agency cited nonpublic information obtained from an investigation into whether there had been violations of securities laws, as well as “press reports raising questions about the potential misuse of funds.”

Britain aims to open a three-year window that exempts sales of newly listed shares from a 0.5% transaction tax to promote initial public offerings on the London Stock Exchange, sister publication Financial News in London reports. The "listing relief" window is contained in a U.K. budget proposal unveiled Wednesday by Chancellor Rachel Reeves. The three-year period would begin with the listing of a new stock and is expected to cut tax revenue by £255 million, or about $335.7 million.

Diversity and inclusion efforts in Canada's private equity and venture capital sectors have gained ground in the past year but greater scrutiny of environmental, social and governance investing and greenwashing could be slowing progress toward "climate neutrality objectives," according to a survey of portfolio companies by the Business Development Bank of Canada's BDC Capital arm.

The Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst Association plans to open a Middle East office next year to bolster its presence in the region. The group, also known as the CAIA Association, plans to add professional staff in the region and to provide Arabic educational programs, including a course on Sharia-compliant investments.

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