Winners:

Caesars: The best IPO of the year currently belongs to gambling house Caesars Entertainment. The stock managed a 71% jump on Day One, at one point coming within cents of doubling. Though the company sold just 1.8 million shares, the stock hasn’t given back all that much in the two days since.

LinkedIn: The professional social-networking site showed it’s still drawing plenty of attention, reporting fourth-quarter profits up 30% from revenue that more than doubled. Shares jumped 18% today after the results hit last night. While that other social network prepares to steal the publicly-traded spotlight, LinkedIn isn’t going away.

Taleo: The human-resources software company got an 18% premium from Oracle in its $1.9 billion deal. And not only that, Taleo proves desirable enough to convince Oracle that Larry Ellison’s earlier statement that cloud-computing is “gibberish” was gibberish itself.

Losers

Diamond Foods: An internal audit committee turned up irregularities, leading the board to can CEO and CFO. It is likely cost the company its $2.35 billion deal for Pringles, too. Shares dropped 37% Thursday after the investigation results were released.

Barneys New York: The men’s clothier has hired bankruptcy and restructuring counsel, WSJ reported this week, another blow for a debt-laden company that’s actually seen earnings improve. With a $200 million credit line due in September, the company needs to refinance.

Private Equity: Apollo Global’s revenue falls 52% and net income dropped 95%. KKR’s earnings plunged 74%. It wasn’t the best time to be a barbarian last quarter. Then Jimmy Choo co-founder Tamara Mellon, who dealt with several PE owners of her shoe and fashion company, kicked the industry while it was down, calling PE firms “vultures” who have “abhorrent greed.”

We’ll Call It A Draw

Deal Journal finds it hard to score the mortgage settlement. The biggest five mortgage servicers are paying a hefty $25 billion to settle claims they had faulty foreclosure procedures. That’s a big chunk of change, but also puts aside much of the uncertainty that had been surrounding them, which is highly valued by investors. At the very least, a long year of back and forth has finally ended.

Martha Stewart LivingOmnimedia lashed back at Macy’s in a court filing Friday, saying the department store giant has no exclusive rights to sell Martha Stewart merchandise, Deal Journal colleague Karen Talley reports.

Forget those commercials of her and Usher showing off their “only at Macy’s” products, Martha never has and never will be a chained down brand.

“Macy’s simply has no exclusive right to Martha Stewart Living’s creativity order sign concepts, now or in the future,” the filing said

While Martha Stewart Living-designed goods are sold in approximately 600 Macy’s stores, they are also available in over 6,000 retail outlets, including Home Depot and other large chain distributors, the filing said.

The argument stems from an agreement Martha Stewart signed with J.C. Penney last year, that gave J.C. Penney the right to sell merchandise and a 16.6% stake in Martha Stewart. Macy’s has filed to block the deal, saying it could lose billions of dollars in sales if it goes through. The department store says the contract it has with Martha Stewart would be violated by the deal.

Fourth-quarter results for refiners Marathon Petroleum Corp., Tesoro Corp. and Sunoco Inc. revealed significant profits in retail units and nine-figure losses tied to refining and fuel marketing.

It’s not the first time this has happened. These companies have been bulking up their retail businesses while some shed refineries. Most notably Sunoco plans to exit the refining business all together this year and become essentially a retail chain and pipeline owner.

The latest example of the push toward retailing comes at Marathon, which said late Thursday that it has agreed to buy GasAmerica Services Inc. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Marathon plans to fold GasAmerica’s 88 filling stations and convenience stores along with “several undeveloped parcels” into its Speedway business, through which it operates nearly 1,400 stores in the Midwest.

While Marathon saw a $182-million fourth-quarter loss from operations at its refining and marketing arm, its Speedway chain of gas stations notched a $73 million gain, up 12% from the year prior.

GasAmerica “is a good fit for us,” said Marathon spokesman Shane Pochard. He noted that its stores, located in Ohio and Indiana, are in Findlay, Ohio-based Marathon’s wheelhouse.

Geographic fit aside, retailing is increasingly where Marathon is finding its stroke — particularly now that the company is facing pressure from investors to split off its predictably profitable pipeline business.

Why is Oracle paying up? Because it needs to catch up, writes Heard on the Street’s Rolfe Winkler.

Winkler visits Mean Street to discuss Oracle’s questionable moves that might paint a cloudy picture for the tech company.

Earlier this week, MF Global’s trustee provided an update on several things but not the missing money. Turns out he just needed a few more days so the world could get ready to hear this: There’s another $400 million now included in the official figure. (Insert Law & Order sound effect here.)

Colleague Jacob Bunge is reporting that the new estimate for the deficiency in customer accounts is $1.6 billion.

It’s not that the trustee discovered hundreds of millions more missing than once suspected. Rather, the current figure formally takes into account $700 million in client money that is in the U.K. and disputed, Bunge reports.

This would be the first update since November, when the figure of the missing money doubled to $1.2 billion. The first time the world heard there was cash missing it was estimated at $600 million.

What remains unclear is if the growing pile of money would be drawn back to its now antiquatedly-named twitter account.

Associated Press

First, it was Service Employees International Union. Then Newt Gingrich joined the chorus. Now Jimmy Choo co-founder Tamara Mellon is piling onto the private-equity bashing bandwagon.

Deal Journal’s colleagues at Private Equity Beat have a post up about Mellon’s social media campaign against PE industry.

Mellon does have significant experience with the industry. She co-founded Jimmy Choo in 1996. She led the high-end shoe and fashion chain under a series of private equity owners from 2001 unitl she left the business in November of last year, six months after it was sold to luxury fashion brand Labelux for close to £500 million ($791 million). The deal marked one of the most successful fashion exits in recent years. Before she left the business, Mellon had a 17% stake in Jimmy Choo.

Click here to read the full post.

Yesterday, Deal Journal spent six hours in the judge’s courtroom, listening to back and forth over the agreed-to buyout $21.1 billion buyout of El Paso by Kinder Morgan.

One issue is whether Goldman, which advised El Paso, was conflicted because it has ties to Kinder Morgan. A lawyer for Goldman said in court the arrangement was a conflict but it was disclosed and the firm took the necessary steps to mitigate the conflict.

He’ll rule by March 6^th on the injunction, but until then, here’s some highlights from his effervescent presiding.

How he describes investment banks: It’s more like a nation comprised of islands of capitalism. Each of the islands competes to prove their own titanic capabilities. There’s a team that’s on the island of investment banking…The island that has the private equity team is a different island…They all compete to bring in the most.

Upon being introduced to El Paso General Counsel Robert Baker: I’ve been enjoying your emails.

Upon being told a lawyer has joined a new law firm with an old colleague: You may be reunited, but I’m not sure it feels so good.

On the possibility he’d issue a temporary injunction 1: Why do I take this out of their hands? I really don’t have the wallet to indemnify everyone and don’t want that on my conscience.

On the possibility he’d issue a temporary injunction 2: Shareholders of El Paso can simply say ‘It’s a stinky, shady deal, I’m not going to do it.’… Traditionally, people that think a deal is stinky, in a non French-cheese kind of way, don’t wish to eat it. So they get an injunction so they enjoin the stink from being dropped on their doorstep. What you are trying to do is get me to stop the stink, but on June 30^th, if you want the stink you can still have it.

[[The deal is supposed to close in the second quarter.]]

On Lloyd Blankfein, who, according to plaintiffs, called Goldman’s banker for El Paso to discuss the issues and ensure there were not problems: I love that the CEO of Goldman is saying ‘We want to manage an appearance of conflict.’…It’s not an appearance of conflict… And frankly it doesn’t make you feel better of people’s motives when they trivialize conflicts. [Goldman's lawyer said it was a conflict and the firm took the necessary steps to mitigate the conflict.]

On naiveté: I’m going to imagine it’s 1981 and I still have bangs and it’s all good. I haven’t even gotten the blast of really bad Australian music yet.

On snack foods: You say you don’t want to eat a Frito, but if you sit in front of [a bowl] for half an hour you are going to eat it. You may even eat a Dorito, which is a decidedly lower-caliber junk good. And then not only will you walk around with a digestive problem…and a waistband issue…you have this color, totally unavailable in nature, on your fingers as a mark of your lack of self restraint.

On leaks from bankers: Whoever makes Depends would have a good business alone because of bankers.

Bank of America must be feeling bit like Sisyphus as it tries to get out from its legal morass. A day after the foreclosure settlement, Deal Journal colleague Liz Moyer reports the bank got hit with another subpoena. Here’s the story:

Massachusetts’ securities regulator on Friday subpoenaed Bank of America in connection with its involvement in two loan securities that resulted in $150 million in losses for investors.

William Galvin, the Secretary of the Commonwealth, is examining whether Bank of America knowingly overvalued the assets in the portfolios in order to get the loans off its books, according to a statement on Friday.

A Bank of America spokesman wasn’t immediately available.

The subpoenas cover documents and records from Banc of America Securities LLC regarding two collateralized loan obligations, LCM VII Ltd. and Bryn Mawr CLO II Ltd., which were structured and sold in 2007. Bank of America Securities merged with Merrill Lynch after its acquisition in 2008.

Bank of America bought $400 million of commercial loans in 2006 and 2007 to be packaged into securities and sold to investors, according to an attorney representing a Nevada investor who earlier this month won a $1.4 million arbitration award against Merrill.

The loans lost 5% of their market value in July 2007 while the bank was holding them, the attorney said.

It’s not the U.S., last year’s leader. Nor is it 2011’s other top finishers Japan and the U.K.

Rather, Dealogic says, it’s Switzerland, home of the world’s 38th largest economy. It’s also home to Roche Holding, which made a $5.8 billion hostile bid for U.S.-based Illumina last month, one of the  biggest offers of the year.

Swiss firms have so far crossed borders for 36 deals worth $12.8 billion, targeting U.S. companies above all others. It accounts for 18% of global cross-boarder deal volume, edging out Japan (14%) and the U.S. (10%), Dealogic says.

It probably shouldn’t surprise that a beneficiary of Switzerland’s acquisition craze is Credit Suisse, leading all advisers over the last 12 months by a healthy margin with work on $10.4 billion worth of deals, Dealogic says. Credit Suisse is followed by Citigroup and Greenhill, leaving UBS out of the top 3.

The Swiss grip on the top spot is tenuous, though, as nearly half the volume is from Roche’s bid for Illumina, which is being fought by the gene-sequencing company.

Meanwhile, Glencore’s massive deal with Xstrata doesn’t actually count toward these stats. Both companies are based in Switzerland.

CEO Clark Smith called the purchase a “milestone acquisition for Buckeye that is integral to our vision and strategy for positioning Buckeye for long-term success.”

Buckeye wants to expand the reach of its network of pipelines to ocean facilities, where it can get international and Gulf Coast petroleum products directly, instead of those offshore products being delivered to the likes of Chevron and then shifted to Buckeye pipelines.

Development of the facility into a “highly-efficient” operation that more fully suits Buckeye will cost another $200 million to $225 million over the next three years, it said.

To fund the deal, Buckeye is selling 4.3 million units to investors for an 8% discount to Thursday’s close, raising $250 million. Buckeye publicly traded units (aka stock) dropped 2.3% Friday.

That unit sale may help ease S&P concerns.

The ratings agency said it was concerned with weaker-than-expected financial results and the prices Buckeye was paying for its recent purchases. The firm’s credit analyst warned if Buckeye continued with aggressive acquisitions its credit position could weaken. S&P said the purchases were funded responsibly, but was worried that lackluster earnings couldn’t improve the debt situation.

Buckeye’s earnings did, in fact, improve in the fourth quarter quite dramatically, and revenue rose 29%, topping expectations Friday.

A spokesman for Buckeye said the company “certainly takes everything that’s out there into account” but that the deal to purchase the facility from Chevron was “well in the works” before S&P’s decision was released. The spokesman said he hopes the earnings, and funding, go a long way toward making S&P comfortable. He also said Buckeye would continue looking for deals if they are available.

Apollo Global Management posted dramatic drops in revenue and income in its fourth quarter.

Following up the bruising report of a quarterly loss from Blackstone last week, KKR’s 74% earnings plunge yesterday, and general concerns about how private equity can operate in the current marketplace, Apollo is feeding the flames a bit.

Toss in a dash of Mitt Romney-fueled spite toward the industry and it’s not the best time to be a PE barbarian.

Apollo’s revenue fell 52% and its profit fell to just $11 million for the period, down a full 95%. For the bleak full 2011, Apollo posted a $469 million loss.

Its economic net income, which excludes some compensation charges and other items, plunged a slightly smaller 62%. But the 80 cents a share in economic net income widely missed the $1.41 expected by Wall Street.

And in the PE segment, the picture is just as bleak. Economic net income in the quarter was down by 71%. The carried interest it gets from its investments dropped from $1.06 billion to $328.7million.

Still, Apollo looked to put on a bright face as CEO Leon Black said in a statement that “2011 was an outstanding year.”

But, as KKR and Blackstone both proved too, the weak performances aren’t correlating into investors fleeing PE firms. Total assets under management at Apollo were up more than 11% from last year and are now up 40% from the end of 2009. And KKR’s miss didn’t stop shares from rising as analysts found bright spots in that report as well.  Apollo is down on very light premarket trading, but trend is worth watching.

Mergers & Acquisitions

Oracle: The company agreed to acquire online-software maker Taleo for $1.9 billion, its second such acquisition in recent months and the latest sign that the software industry’s old guard is embracing a newer model. [WSJ]

Related: Customers have a habit of slipping through your fingers when, instead of offering innovative products, you seek to keep them locked into old ones. That is a pricey lesson Oracle is learning. [WSJ]

What now for NYSE? Duncan Niederauer will lay out NYSE Euronext’s stand-alone strategy following the collapse of its blockbuster merger with Deutsche Börse, though for once looking back might be more appetizing than the challenges that lay ahead. [WSJ]

Kinder-El Paso: A Delaware Court of Chancery judge called conflict allegations “serious” in a shareholder suit seeking to temporarily halt the takeover of El Paso by Kinder Morgan. [WSJ]

Pringles: Procter & Gamble has decided it will seek to terminate its sale of the Pringles to Diamond Foods. [Bloomberg]

Fibrek: Mercer International agreed to buy Canada’s Fibrek in a deal that would value the kraft pulp producer at about C$170 million ($171.04 million), topping Abitibibowater’s bid. [Reuters]

Financial Institutions

BarCap: Barclays said it would cap investment banker bonuses as its 2011 full-year net profit slumped on a sharp drop in investment banking revenue. [WSJ]

Credit Suisse: The Swiss bank reported an unexpected loss for the fourth quarter, slashed bonuses and accelerated efforts to sell risky assets. [WSJ]

Related: Only a year ago, Credit Suisse appeared to be one of the European banking sector’s biggest winners from the global financial crisis. Now its investment bank is paying the price for problems at its investment bank. [Heard on the Street]

Legal & Regulatory

Insider bill: The House passed legislation that would formally ban insider trading by Congress, picking up support from some surprising backers—lawmakers who actively trade stocks. [WSJ]

Foreclosure settlement: The $25 billion settlement of alleged foreclosure abuses unveiled Thursday will provide relief to an estimated one million at-risk borrowers. [WSJ]

Related: Shelling out a $25 billion penalty is certainly painful. But it is something bank-stock investors may be able to grin and bear. [Heard on the Street]

Ralph Cioffi & Matthew Tannin: Two former hedge-fund managers at Bear Stearns Cos. agreed to a settlement with the SEC that would avert a second trial over allegations related to a $1.6 billion blowup during the financial crisis. [WSJ]

Playing favorites: The Fed secretly selected a handful of banks to bid for debt securities acquired in the bailout of AIG, and the rest of Wall Street is wondering what happened to the transparency the central bank said it was committed to upholding. [Bloomberg]

Citi & Libor: Citigroup was forced to write off $50m after two traders accused of attempting to influence global lending rates left the bank.  [FT.com]

Bankruptcy & Restructuring

Eastman Kodak, which began making cameras more than a century ago, said it plans to stop supplying digital cameras and pocket video cameras as it focuses its consumer business on photo printing. [WSJ]

Lehman Brothers: Lehman is suing Citigroup Inc. in an effort to recover $2.5 billion transferred to Citi in the months before Lehman’s September 2008 bankruptcy filing. [WSJ]

Capital Markets

Quicksilver Production Partners: The limited partnership, formed last year by Quicksilver Resources to acquire oil and gas properties in North America, filed with regulators to raise up to $250 million through an IPO. [Reuters]

Companies & Industries

Diamond: Michael J. Mendes, who was dismissed as CEO of Diamond Foods on Tuesday in the wake of accounting irregularities at the company, thought big in his 20 years at what was once a low-key walnut growers’ cooperative. [WSJ]

PepsiCo: PepsiCo is chopping 8,700 jobs and increasing its marketing budget as it tries to overhaul a struggling U.S. beverage business. [WSJ]

Related: Will PepsiCo’s latest offensive mark a turning point in the latest cola wars? [Heard on the Street]

Apple vs. Google: Google plans to make a branded home-entertainment system, moving toward control of both the software and hardware process, a formula used by rival Apple. [WSJ]

Rio-Alcan: Rio Tinto has been forced to write off another $8.9 billion from its Canadian aluminium business Alcan, another timely reminder of how badly wrong megadeals can go in the mining sector. [Heard on the Street]

LinkedIn: The company’s profit jumped 30% and its revenue more than doubled, providing a lift to the young social-networking industry ahead of Facebook’s IPO later this year. [WSJ]

Barclays PLC may not have taken any government money, unlike its peers, but with banker compensation such a hot-button issue, it doesn’t want to appear out of touch.

Barclays released its full-year results Friday morning, and reported a 8% drop in net profit due to a sharp fall in investment-banking revenue.

On compensation, Barclays Capital said it cut its bonus pool by almost a third to £1.5 billion, or about $2.4 billion. Group-wide cash bonuses were cut to £832 million, including those of the top eight executives.

However, Chief Executive Bob Diamond didn’t say whether he would take a bonus this year, though he acknowledged the need to “remain sensitive” to the public mood. Unlike Royal Bank of Scotland PLC and Lloyds Banking Group PLC, Barclays didn’t receive a government bailout.

Still, Barclays appears mindful of the opinion of the public and regulators. In a statement, it says the proportion of its deferred bonus “significantly exceeds” the requirements of the Financial Services Authority, with 75% of the bonus pool deferred “amongst the higher deferral levels globally.”

Bloomberg News

A logo sits on a sign outside a Barclays Plc bank branch in London, U.K., on Wednesday, Feb. 8, 2012.

Barclays PLC has capped the cash component of bonuses at £65,000 (US$103,000) people familiar with the matter said.

Barclays is responding to a difficult environment for investment banks and intense political scrutiny of pay in Britain.

It was unclear how the remaining portion of the bonus will be paid. But the bonus appears to be one of the smallest among the major investment banks.

Morgan Stanley last month told employees that bonuses will drop sharply, with cash payouts capped at $125,000, according to other people familiar with the matter.

More than three years after Barclays absorbed Lehman Brothers’ North American operations in a cut-price deal that represented a critical moment of the financial crisis, Barclays has yet to achieve its most lofty goals.

Barclays reports its 2011 results later on Friday.

–Isabella Steger contributed to this article.

One Indonesian investor has come out strongly in support of Bumi PLC’s Indonesian management in its highly public feud with Nat Rothschild.

Yawadwipa Companies, a new fund formed by former Bank of America Merrill Lynch dealmaker Chad Holm, said in a statement Thursday that it firmly stands with billionaire Samin Tan in the spat, which escalated further last week with news that Bumi’s Indonesian executives plan to oust Mr. Rothschild in a shareholder vote.

Without naming names, Yawadwipa said it views certain comments made in November by a “certain Bumi PLC insider” as “recklessly and carelessly delivered via a public forum…[A]s an insider and board member, such delivery, in our opinion, was wholly unacceptable. If an employee did this, such individual most certainly would have been fired on the spot.”

Mr. Rothschild lambasted corporate governance standards at Bumi in November, according to a letter he wrote that was published by the Financial Times.

Yawadwipa said it hopes to become an investor in Bumi, but wants the current spat to die down before committing itself, and welcomes the proposal outlined by Mr. Tan as the best way forward. It even said it could acquire “sufficient voting shares” of Bumi to ensure Mr. Tan’s plan is voted through.

Yawadwipa is still in the process of raising money to close a $1 billion private equity fund in Indonesia.

Mr. Holm said in an e-mailed response that Yawadwipa does not have money, and has not been promised any money, from any of Bumi’s related parties or their affiliates, but “certainly as an investment management firm we would welcome their support in the future.”

“We do however have a strong vested interest in Indonesia and when appropriate measures are taken and spun as poor corporate governance, it reflects badly on the country and for us and our investment in building a leading presence in the market. Our interest in this matter, to remove uncertainty, is as simple as that,” he added.

However, Chancellor Leo Strine suggested he was reluctant to step in when shareholders could still veto the deal.

“Shareholders of El Paso can simply say ‘It’s a shady, stinky deal, I’m not going to do it,’” Chancellor Strine said. He added he was concerned Kinder Morgan would walk away if he issued an injunction, and he didn’t want that on his conscience.

He reserved judgment and said he would rule on the request for a temporary injunction by March 6^th, when El Paso shareholders are to vote on the deal. He raised the possibility that damages could be awarded after the close of a deal.

Consider KKR, which missed estimates on a host of numbers but saw shares rise 1.28%, or 19 cents, to $15.06.

Its fourth-quarter economic net income, which combines both realized and unrealized investment gains and its private-equity’s preferred performance measure, was $285.5 million, or 33 cents a share, down from $714.6 million, or $1.02 a share, the year prior.

Net profit fell more than 74% to $46.1 million.

But, analysts with Credit Suisse wrote in a research note, “underlying cash earnings were more positive and the fund raising outlook is healthy.”

KKR revealed Thursday that it raised about $6 billion for its latest North American buyout fund. That’s a lot less than it’s last such fund in 2006, which reached $17.6 billion. But KKR still has a year of fundraising left.

Indeed, “KKR’s alternative product lineup should gain traction as underfunded institutional investors search for attractive risk reward activities that provide good portfolio diversification,” Wells Fargo analysts wrote in a research note.

Overall, Wells Fargo’s analysts wrote, KKR’s private-equity and capital markets business are “well positioned” for an improving economy.

And an improving economy should also lift KKR’s quarterly performances, as the value it can assign its portfolio companies rises along with publicly traded peers.

– Delaware Chancellor Strine Reserves Judgment on Injunction Request in El Paso/Kinder Morgan Case

– Strine Says He Will Rule by March 6^th, When El Paso Shareholders Are to Vote on the Deal

– Injunction Request Part of Shareholder Suit Alleging Conflict of Interest in Sale Process

– Kinder Morgan Agreed Last Year to Buy El Paso for $21.1 billion

Professional networking site reported fourth-quarter earnings of $13.3 million, or 12 cents per share, compared to $5.2 million, or five cents a share, for the same period in 2010. Revenue came in at $167.7 in fourth quarter, compared to $87.7 million in the fourth quarter of 2010.

That beat Wall Street’s estimates. Analysts expected LinkediIn to earned seven cents a share on revenue of $160 million in the quarter, according to FactSet.

Shares of LinkedIn have sagged since it reported third-quarter earning and early investors and executives sold some of their shares in a follow-on offering after the IPO lockup period ended. Despite the selloff, MarketWatch’s Dan Gallagher points out that Wall Street remains cautious with half the analysts covering the company maintaining neutral ratings. Several cited concerns about valuation.

To better understand LinkedIn earnings, here’s a cheatsheet from Citigroup of what to look for: