Market at a glance: Option One sells for over $1B

On the deals side, LBO shops completed 13 control-stake transactions during the past week, including a billion-dollar deal.

The billion-dollar transaction, a rare find this year, occurred with the help of Invesco Ltd. Its WL Ross & Co. unit acquired Option One Mortgage Corp. from H&R Block Inc. for about $1.1 billion in cash.

The second largest deal of the past week was Kabel Deutschland Vertrieb und Service GmbH & Co.’s purchase of Orion Cable GmbH’s cable network assets for $823.4 million. Kabel Deutschland is a unit of Providence Equity Partners Inc.

Only these two and two other deals had disclosed values last week, for a combined total of about $2.2 billion, according to Thomson Reuters (publisher of PE Week). Year-to-date deal volume stands at $50.3 billion.

Fund-raising activity

Year-to-date fund-raising activity of buyout and mezzanine firms now hovers a little below $100 million. Most recently, GI Partners raised about $1.2 billion for GI Partners Fund III. The Menlo Park, Calif.-based firm disclosed this fund-raising effort in a regulatory filing near the end of the first quarter.

Meanwhile, Towerbrook Capital Partners has raised more than $760 million for Towerbrook Investors III and Milestone Partners Management Co. has collected more than $103 million for Milestone Partners III, according to regulatory filings.

Adding to the fund-raising totals was Silver Lake Partners, which closed its first middle-market investment fund, Silver Lake Sumeru, at $1.1 billion. Roughly $374 million was raised this year. Silver Lake Sumeru is designed to invest in middle-market technology and technology-enabled companies in the hardware, software, Internet and technology-oriented services sectors

Presidio Financial Partners and its affiliated investment unit, Presidio Financial Partners, closed Presidio Investors Fund I at $44.5 million. The fund will invest in lower middle market companies. —Eamon Beltran