* Samsung providing 5 yr guarantees on revenue-sourceBy Stephen Aldred and Ju-min ParkHONG KONG/SEOUL, Oct 18 (Reuters) - Global private equity fund Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co LP and Asian buyout fund MBK Partners are among bidders for a majority stake in Samsung Group’s procurement arm iMarketKorea Inc , two sources told Reuters on Tuesday.Samsung Group said in August that it planned to sell a combined 58.7 percent stake in the non-core business, held by nine of its affiliates, in a rare divestment by the South Korean conglomerate. The bids went in on Friday.Goldman Sachs Group Inc has been hired to advise on the sale of the stake, which is valued at 372 billion won ($326 million) based on Tuesday’s closing share price of 17,650 won.An official for South Korean shopping mall operator Interpark Corp also confirmed it is heading a consortium which placed a bid.The Interpark group contains private equity fund H&Q, the sources said.An external spokeswoman for KKR could not offer an immediate comment, while MBK could not immediately be reached for comment. Goldman Sachs declined to comment.The sources declined to be identified as the discussions were private.The size of the stake could be smaller, as Samsung earlier said it might maintain an interest in Imarketkorea if buyers request it. That interest could be up to 10 percent, one of the sources said.Samsung set up Imarketkorea in 2000 to provide goods and maintenance services for business clients.The conglomerate is providing five-year guarantees to prospective buyers, to ensure two trillion won of revenue annually through Imarketkorea, one of the sources said.

By Vivek Prakash With the world’s population set to hit 7 billion on October 31, photographers in India have been on the move to tell stories that talk about what those numbers really mean in a country as large as India – with 1.2 billion people and counting, this is supposed to be the world’s largest democracy. When you take a closer look at the statistics, you find some surprising and scary figures – the ratio of female children to males born actually declined here over the last 10 years – from 933 females for every thousand males in the 2001 census, to just 914 in 2011. The combination of cheap portable ultrasound technology and a decades-old preference for male babies — who are seen as breadwinners — has enabled sex-selective abortions and made worse female infanticide. In a place as wide and as vast as India, these are things that are hard to control, no matter how illegal. We had been trying to find ways to illustrate this for some time without much success – getting access to tell this story had been taking some time. Late last month, a story about a small village in Gujarat was brought to my attention. Journalists from the Thomson Reuters Foundation had visited Siyani, a small rural town of just 8,000 people (tiny by Indian standards) – where the social effect of such a low ratio of women meant that men were having a tough time finding brides. I set out to remote Gujarat to try and interpret this story with my camera. A village elder told me that he estimated some 70% of the men there were unmarried. There were a variety of historical causes – lack of industrialization, an unwillingness to marry outside caste and regional lines – and most recently, a rapidly declining supply of brides. There are over 350 unmarried men over 35 – this a remarkable figure for rural India, where people marry very young – some as early as 15. There are hundreds more under 35, but there are so many that no one can confirm the numbers. I spoke to many people in the town – both those born and brought up there, and others who had settled there for work over the decades – and found a similar story among many men – “I just can’t get married.” This was a tough nut to crack – how do I take these anecdotes and make them into meaningful visual statements? I spent a lot of time thinking about what the significant pictures would be. A man alone didn’t tell the story. To really tell it, I had to find a group of men who lived together, worked together, and ate together – and did all the things that women traditionally do in Indian households. I found a group of about three dozen men working on a temple in the village. All but three were not married. I photographed them sharing their work and lives. Doing the daily chores – cooking, cleaning. The lack of enough women to marry, for them, has forced them into a situation where they live communally and have to share in the daily tasks. I photographed them sharing mattress in their downtime, sleeping in the way you’d expect newlywed couples to sleep. The lack of a female presence in their lives has made them turn to each other – into a sort of extended brotherhood – to look after each other. I needed to find a picture that would illustrate the dusty village and also tell the story of the large number of unmarried men there. This was going to be difficult – organizing anything in India takes a lot of effort, and almost never goes to plan. If it’s bad in the cities, it’s almost impossible in a little rural village. I hatched a plot with my translator and driver. We would enlist a couple of village elders to spread the word that at a certain time, when the light was good, that unmarried men who were willing should gather in the village’s center for a group picture. I tried and failed on my first day. On the second morning, no one bothered to show up – everyone ate breakfast and went straight to work in the fields and at the temples. Fair enough, I was an interruption there. On the third day, we modified our plan to see if we could make it happen. About a half hour before the appointed time – 6.15pm with the golden light and deep blue sky – we sent a teenager on a bicycle off around the village, to round up any unmarried men that had nothing better to do. I was surprised that this actually worked, and I suddenly had in a clearing in the village, about 40 men in front of me. We were going to make a picture that I thought was central to the whole story. Sometimes, when I’m shooting a tough-to-illustrate story in remote places, the humanity, humor and absurdity of this job really hit me. There I was in a village clearing in remote Gujarat, not able to speak a word of Gujarati – speaking in Hindi to an interpreter who would shout it out to everyone else. By this time many other people in the village knew what was going on. I was standing on a ladder to do this picture – something I’d checked in and brought with me on the flight all the way from Mumbai to make this picture possible. Behind me, was a group of gawking men who were having a good laugh at the whole spectacle. I finished the shoot and headed over to the local chai stall. I felt like the whole village was following me. I spent the next couple of hours entertaining a lot of questions and comments about the story I was doing. I was overwhelmed by the number of men who said they wanted to be married but just couldn’t be – some had been trying for as long as 20 years, since they were 15 years old. I’m having a laugh at the experience of trying to tell this story, but spare a thought for what happens to India if we continue to let our female children die, or be killed at such an alarming rate. Spare a thought for places like Siyani, where people just can’t get married – Siyani isn’t special, it’s an indicator of a much wider problem. Spare a thought for places in India where there are as few as 775 girls born for every 1,000 boys. Spare a thought for the men who will never have families, and spare a moment to think of all the mothers that will never be born. Little Siyanis are popping up all over India – what becomes of our next generation, and how will it impact the world’s largest democracy?

“Also you must take into account that Ireland, Portugal and Greece already have amounts set aside for bank recapitalisations within their programmes,” said Frankel, who is chief financial officer of the EFSF, and deputy to its chief executive.Frankel’s remarks come amid concerns on financial markets that demands for help from the EFSF to bolster weak banks would leave the 440 billion euro fund with little firepower to rescue a country, if that were to prove necessary.European officials are attempting to launch a recapitalisation drive, with estimates for the final bill ranging from 100 to 200 billion euros and beyond.Frankel also said the EFSF would tap short-term funding markets — paper with a maturity of less than one year — which makes it easier to raise big sums.He said the EFSF’s funding would become more flexible and diversified.”This also means that we will implement a short-term funding strategy which could be structured around a bill programme.”Frankel said preparation for the new permanent euro zone support scheme, the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), was under way and that technically, the EFSF could already carry out its mission.”ESM will have the same mission as the EFSF so in practical terms, we are already ready,” he said. “We have already started preparing the ESM internally.”

** Tokio Marine Capital, a Japanese private equity firm affiliated with Tokyo Marine Holdings , has launched the sale of drugmaker Showa Yakuhin Kako Co in a deal that could be worth as much as 70 billion yen ($905 million), according to three people with direct knowledge of the matter.** Oil and gas firm Ophir Energy has agreed to buy Dominion Petroleum in a 118 million pound ($186 million) all-share deal that will expand its portfolio of projects in East Africa.

Permira had been in exclusive talks with Alcatel-Lucent for several months, although a person close to the company, cited by the FT, said this was relaxed to allow interest from other groups.Genesys, which was acquired by Alcatel in 2000, sells software that is used in call centres and video conferencing.Both Alcatel-Lucent and Permira were unavailable for immediate comment.

EGP’s North American unit, which owns 51 percent of the project, will develop it together with its partner TradeWind Energy. The wind farm will help avoid the annual emission of over 470,000 tonnes of CO2.

Prosecutors are seeking one of the longest sentences ever for an insider-trading defendant, arguing that the 54-year-old Galleon Group founder is “the modern face” of illegal stock trading. The sentencing, which had been delayed, is set for Thursday.Overall, people found guilty of insider trading tend to get lighter sentences than federal guidelines prescribe, in part because judges may opt to go easy out of the view that market trading crimes — while harmful to confidence in financial markets — typically does not harm anyone in particular.The government has requested a prison term between 19-1/2 years and 24-1/2 years for Rajaratnam, who was convicted in May in one of the biggest Wall Street trading cases in a generation.U.S. District Judge Richard Holwell in Manhattan may opt for a sentence that is less severe but that could still be very long, legal experts said.”This is an opportunity for the judge to give a stiff sentence … and yet also display the notion of elements of mercy,” said Eli J. Richardson, a former federal prosecutor now at law firm Bass, Berry & Sims.Rajaratnam will join a small club of fallen financiers and executives who have spent years behind bars for insider trading or related securities offenses.Michael Milken, the so-called king of junk bonds, received a 10-year prison sentence in 1990 after pleading guilty to securities violations. Ivan Boesky, the famed Wall Street stock speculator of the 1980s, was sentenced to three years in prison in 1987 after pleading guilty to a criminal charge related to insider trading.Rajaratnam’s lawyers are fighting to allow him to remain under house arrest in his luxury Manhattan apartment while he appeals his conviction. They say he suffers from an array of health problems and that a long prison term would amount to a “death sentence.”Holwell has kept a customary silence about Rajaratnam’s possible sentence. However, three months ago in sentencing a Rajaratnam associate, Danielle Chiesi, to 2-1/2 years in prison, he gave a stern warning to traders.”The message to Wall Street needs to be loud and clear: If you trade on inside information, you will be caught; if convicted, you will be sentenced to prison,” Holwell said.Rajaratnam also may be wary given the sentence handed to a former Galleon trader, Zvi Goffer, who was ordered last month to a decade in prison for his insider-trading conviction.HEALTH ISSUESProsecutors want Holwell to have Rajaratnam taken into custody immediately after sentencing. The judge could allow Rajaratnam to remain under house arrest while his case is on appeal, or surrender to prison at a later date, freeing him of the spectacle of being whisked away in handcuffs on Thursday.If ordered to prison, Rajaratnam could spend his days cleaning toilets, sweeping floors and working in the library — a far cry from running a hedge fund with $7 billion under management at its peak. His prison conditions could depend, however, on what authorities decide about his health.In arguing for leniency, Rajaratnam’s lawyers cite “chronic, life-threatening and degenerative diseases” that they argue the federal prisons bureau is unable to treat.But it’s difficult to prevail on that argument, said defense lawyers not involved in the case. Prisons can offer medical care, so Rajaratnam must show he suffers from a unique or particularly difficult problem, said Richard Scheff, chairman of law firm Montgomery, McCracken, Walker & Rhoads.Rajaratnam’s life already was radically transformed by his October 2009 arrest, 18 months of legal battles over FBI phone taps and then a two month-long trial, where former friends and business associates testified against him. He was convicted on 14 conspiracy and securities fraud charges.The jury heard 45 telephone calls secretly recorded by investigators, evidence of his efforts from 2004 to 2009 to gain an illegal edge in stocks of companies including Goldman Sachs Group and Intel Corp. Prosecutors say he netted $63.8 million in illicit gains from the improper tips.SRI LANKARajaratnam, a U.S. citizen, was born in Sri Lanka. He earned an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School in 1983 and has lived most of his life in the United States. He is married and has three children.Rajaratnam faces a federal lawsuit in New Jersey by victims of Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the separatist group defeated in the decades-long Sri Lankan civil war. Rajaratnam denies allegations that he gave money to the group.If sentenced to more than 10 years, Rajaratnam could be sent to a medium-security prison with a hospital such as the Butner, North Carolina prison where swindler Bernard Madoff, 73, is serving a life term. Unlike low-security prisons where white-collar offenders often serve time, medium-security prisons are more restricted and house gang members, drug offenders and child molesters.Rajaratnam’s defense team declined comment on how he is preparing for the possibility of prison. But Larry Levine, a former inmate and founder of Wall Street Prison Consultants, said he will need to develop survival skills.Levine said he would advise Rajaratnam to “say thank you, say excuse me, say please. Don’t sit on somebody else’s bunk. Don’t pick up somebody else’s property. Don’t be changing the channel on the television.”The case is USA v Raj Rajaratnam et al, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, No. 09-01184.