bloggingbuyouts

Wall Street has its own brand of breaking up. There may not be 50 ways but there are at least two -- the easy way and the hard way. According to the New York Times, KKR and The Goldman Sachs Group (NYSE: GS) are splitting with Harman International (NYSE: HAR) the easy way, while J.C . Flowers is taking the hard route to killing its deal with SLM Corp (NYSE: SLM).

The easy way, in the Harman case, is for the buyers to buy $400 million worth of Harman bonds instead of paying $8 billion to own the company. Under the new agreement, the buyout deal struck in April will be dissolved, with no litigation or payment of the $225 million termination fee. Instead, KKR and Goldman will buy bonds that can be exchanged for Harman shares at $104, below the $120-a-share price of the original offer -- but much higher than its current $85.87.

Harman gets some cash and saves face while KKR and Goldman get out of investing in a cratering company -- HAR's earnings of 50 cents a share for the most recent quarter are expected to be less than half of the $1.02 analysts had forecast.

Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) is heading toward Japan in a partnered bid with Aetos Capital LLC to buy Japanese property company Simplex Investment Advisors in a 65% premium share bid, for the equivalent of about $1.1 billion to $1.35 billion, depending on your price calculations in current and closing prices of yen on the Japanese stock prices versus closing prices. The bid is for at least 80% of Simplex, and it appears that Nikko Cordial, part of Citigroup Inc. (NYSE: C) in Japan, is selling its 42.5% stake to the venture.

If you think the U.S. property weakness has been bad, the situation in Japan has been worse. Japan experienced its own bubble back in the 1980s, and only in recent years have things seemed to get better. Goldman Sachs has already been active in buying commercial and recreational properties in Japan over the last decade, but this would mark a larger leap into a property market that may hold relative values.

Goldman Sachs was Jim Cramer's #2 Value Pick for 2007, and he recently said he thinks its stock could go to $300.00 per share next year. If you look at how Goldman Sachs recently crushed earnings by betting against mortgages, you'll know why.

Goldman Sachs has raised over $4 billion this year for property acquisitions, so you can assume more land grabs are coming. Bloomberg has a pretty detailed piece that gives more background on the ongoing landgrabs in Japan. If you want to look up more data on Simplex Investment Advisors, it trades under the numeric stock ticker "8942" on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

Jon Ogg produces the SPECIAL SITUATION INVESTING NEWSLETTER and he does not own securities in the companies he covers.

Myers Industries (NYSE: MYE) got its start more than 70 years ago. The founders included two brothers, Louis and Meyer Myers. They saw a big market opportunity for tire repair and retreading. So with a $620 loan, they got their company going.

Now, the company is a leader in the manufacturing of polymer products. Annual revenues are about $780 million or so.

But soon Myers will no longer be a public company. This week, it announced that it is going private for $1.07 billion (which includes the $276.0 million of debt). The buyer is GS Capital Partners, which is the private equity arm of Goldman Sachs.

Over the past couple years, Myers has gone through a restructuring. But the stock price has not moved much (at least over the past 12 months).

However, Wall Street is betting there will be a higher bid. The current stock price for Myers is $22.50, which is the exact amount of GS's offer.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including the Complete M&A Handbook and the EDGAR-Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements.