The bank had purchased stakes in American financial institutions without fully disclosing its involvement to regulators.
Some companies still remember tales that circulated in the late 1990s about hedge funds that purchased stakes in small companies through what was known as a "death-spiral convertible".
Mr. Burkle is a prominent contributor to Democratic causes and has made Yucaipa a major investor in the supermarket business, having purchased stakes in Ralphs, now part of Kroger, and Pathmark, now part of the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company.
In some areas where India has purchased stakes in oil fields, it is pulling light crude oil — the kind that sets the benchmark oil price — out of the ground for less than $40 a barrel, Mr. Srinivasan said.
While other foreign mining companies, like Placer Dome of Vancouver, British Columbia, have purchased stakes in South African gold deposits, the merger announced today is the first between a South African and a foreign producer.
In the past year, billionaire investors like George Gillett, the owner of the NHL's Montreal Canadians and English soccer club Liverpool, and Fortress Investment Group President Rob Kaufman purchased stakes in teams (Gillett Evernham Motorsports and Michael Waltrip Racing, respectively) after seeing value in NASCAR.
Rupert Murdoch realized that Walt Disney, which had purchased stakes in the Anaheim Angels and hockey's Mighty Ducks during the mid-1990s, planned on using its teams to launch a southern California cable sports channel.
American companies used debt to buy back their own shares; British businesses used it to purchase stakes in foreign firms.
Paulson was adamantly opposed to a more radical approach of purchasing stakes in leading banks, citing negative precedents in Japan.
The managers, some of whom started purchasing stakes at a valuation of about $20 billion, have now bought more than eight million shares at various prices, one person said, adding that the purchases could have been either for SAC or personal portfolios.
