Rick’s Cabaret has, er, stripped down the amount of cash it will have to dole out to buy adult nightclub Scores-Las Vegas.

Instead of having to pay $16 million in cash, Rick’s has been able to renegotiate the terms to pay just $12 million in cash in the $21 million deal.

The extra $4 million can now be made as a non-convertible promissory note with an interest rate of 8 percent.

Nice. But the deal isn’t as sweet for parties having to complete purchases that they agreed to before the casino industry’s luck started to turn.

The casino industry was always believed to be recession-proof: when the economy is doing well, people go to casinos to spend money. It’s fun. When the economy is not doing well, people go to casinos to make money. It’s no fun.

But casinos are now proving to be vulnerable to the downturn. Rising gas prices and falling home values are making consumers think twice about traveling to casinos and gambling or shopping at the luxury boutiques and restaurants where casinos draw most of their profits.

Amid these changes, Penn National Gaming’s pending $6.1 billion buyout by private equity firms Fortress Investment and Centerbridge Partners continues to be, well, pending. The PE firms seem to have had a change of heart and a delay in getting regulatory approvals from states is only helping them do the dilly-dally.

Things have changed since these firms agreed to buy the casino company last June. A Wall Street Journal report on Tuesday said turnaround and bankruptcy experts are getting more calls from casinos than they have in years as the operators struggle with less access to cash amid expansion plans and billions of dollars of debt.

The report quoted Gary Loveman told the Journal this is “the toughest environment” they’ve ever faced.

As the hands dealt to these players have changed, we can probably expect to see renegotiated buyouts, fewer sales and more bankruptcies.

The problem with Anheuser Busch’s defence strategy is that it makes the Budweiser-maker an even more enticing target for InBev, for if the St Louis-based brewer can trim costs so easily how much more can the ruthless cost cutters at InBev take out?

Anheuser would have a stronger case if it had a stronger track record as a cost controller. But while top executives at InBev are said to travel the Atlantic in economy class, Anheuser has a fleet of Falcon executive jets and Bell helicopters.

So if Anheuser can cut $1 billion in costs by 2010 what can InBev do? The Brazilian-led management have been reported to be looking at $1.4 billion, and perhaps even more once the aircraft are put on the block.

Moreover, the St Louis management want to keep their SeaWorld theme parks and still make some of their beer packaging, while InBev sees vertical integration as a thing of past and would put these non-core assets up for sale for $4 billion plus.

InBev can probably afford to increase its cash bid to $70 per Anheuser share from the current $65 before the deal becomes less compelling, but until it makes a higher bid the market will fret it may turn to equity to bridge the $5 gap rather than raise more debt or promise to sell down Anheuser’s 50 percent stake in Mexican brewer Modelo.

It probably needs only a few dollars more per share for a winning bid, but InBev will be in no hurry with global markets tumbling, Anheuser’s defence plan unconvincing and a Delaware court case which may oust Anheuser directors still to be decided.        

As if having the U.S. Justice Department on your back because your bankers may have been helping wealthy Americans avoid tax wasn’t enough, Swiss banking giant UBS also has to deal with grumpy regulators at home. The head of the Swiss Federal Banking Commission, Daniel Zuberbuehler (pictured), tells us that singling out UBS and Credit Suisse for tough treatment is justifiable and has laid down a tight timetable for new rules to restrain the two. The banks will be required to hoard considerably more capital, which will surely slow them down on Wall St. On Monday, the DOJ said it had asked a federal court in Miami to authorize the Internal Revenue Service to request information from UBS about U.S. taxpayers who may be using Swiss bank accounts to evade federal income taxes. Coughing up tax fraudsters to the IRS could make the sell-off of UBS’s U.S. wealth management backbone – once known as Paine Webber – a tad trickier, but perhaps no less necessary.

A detailed blow-by-blow of the death of Bear Stearns by Vanity Fair’s Bryan Burrough casts current market rumors rumbling about the health of Lehman Brothers in an eerie light. The author, who DealBook notes co-wrote “Barbarians at the Gate,” takes aim at CNBC and hedge funds as it works to uncover what it posits could be the “murder” of the country’s fifth-biggest investment bank. This morning, CNBC’s Charlie Gasparino and DealBook editor Andrew Ross Sorkin are talking about the prospects for Lehman being “taken out”.

High in the “priced to move” column, commercial lender CIT Group agreed to sell its home lending business to private equity firm Lone Star Funds for $1.5 billion in cash to increase liquidity, and said it would take a related second-quarter charge of $2 billion. CIT also agreed to sell its $470 million manufactured housing portfolio to Vanderbilt Mortgage and Finance for about $300 million. “These sales complete our exit from all home lending businesses, removing the uncertainty surrounding this asset class,” Chief Executive Jeffrey Peek said. Lone Star will also be taking on $4.4 billion of outstanding debt and other related liabilities. Home lending may not be that far off the path for CIT, but getting out of the business certainly helped tax preparer H&R Block, which announced strong results and a better outlook yesterday, so any price is clearly worth it – CIT’s stock was up over 11 percent in premarket trade.

Manitowoc said it had beaten out Illinois Tool Works in the official auction for British kitchen equipment maker Enodis. Manitowoc said it will pay 328 pence for each Enodis share, or about $2.45 billion, not including the assumption of about $249 million of the U.K. company’s debt. Enodis, which makes fast-food fryers, became the center of a takeover tussle between the two U.S. diversified manufacturers this spring. The two bidders saw Enodis, which counts Burger King and McDonald’s among its customers, as a way to play on rising demand for fast food in markets such as Asia.

Other deals of the day:

* Italy’s third-biggest refiner, Saras, said it has bought a 30 percent stake in an Italian wind power company from Australian investment firm Babcock & Brown.

* InBev stuck to its proposal to take over reluctant bid target Anheuser-Busch and said it would seek to give the latter’s shareholders a direct voice if the U.S. brewer still refused to talk.

* Norwegian recycling equipment maker Tomra said it bought Australian peer Ultrasort for 160 million Norwegian crowns ($31.48 million) in enterprise value.

* State-owned National Bank of Egypt has sold its holdings in six companies for a combined total of 5.29 billion Egyptian pounds ($993 million), the financial daily Al Mal said on Tuesday.

* Indonesia’s largest lender, PT Bank Mandiri, said it had acquired a 51 percent stake in automotive financing firm PT Tunas Financindo Sarana (Tunas Finance), for an undisclosed amount.

* U.S. pork producer Smithfield Foods Inc said that COFCO Limited, China’s largest agricultural trading and processing company, will buy a near-5-percent stake in the company.

* Israeli holding company Koor Industries said it has accumulated 100 million Swiss francs ($98.23 million) worth of shares in Credit Suisse Group.

* Major Chinese engine maker Weichai Power said it has agreed to take a stake in Beiqi Foton Motor under a deal to expand its business ties with the truck maker.

* British telecoms company Cable & Wireless said it was in talks with rival Thus Group about a potential 180 pence-per-share offer for the company.

* Malaysia’s TM International and Indian mobile operator Idea Cellular will launch an open offer on Aug. 22 to buy up to 20 percent of Spice Communications, their investment banker said.

* New Zealand rural services firm PGG Wrightson said it would pay NZ$220 million ($167 million) for a 50 percent stake in meat producer Silver Fern Farms (SFF), sending its shares lower.

* South Korea’s POSCO said it had agreed to buy a 10 percent stake in coal mining firm Macarthur from the Australian group’s shareholder Ken Talbot at A$20 a share.

(Picture: Director of the Swiss Federal Banking Commission, Daniel Zuberbuehler, at a news conference in Bern. 27/03/2007 – Reuters)

August Busch IV may be trying to show he can be tough on cost controls as the beer giant he leads attempts to fight off a takeover bid from Belgian-Brazilian rival InBev. But an analyst has pointed out that when it comes to flying its executives around, the company may have some questions to answer.  

It seems that Anheuser-Busch could be running a substantial fleet of executive jets, Bernstein Research said in a note dated today. 

Bernstein said that according to a Dassault Falcon Customer Service Newsletter published at the end of 2006, Anheuser had eight Falcon executive jets and was the US launch customer for the new top-of-the-range Falcon 7x in 2007. 

“It may be completely insignificant but we note that the defence presentation assigns savings to G&A (general and administrative) personnel rather than corporate expenses,” the Bernstein note says in reference to Anheuser’s effort to thwart the InBev bid.  

Anheuser declined immediate comment. The company said last week that it would make some staff cuts and reduce some employee pension payouts. 

 The Federal Aviation Administration’s aircraft registry lists two Dassault Falcon corporate jets, two Bell light helicopters and a Raven hot air balloon as owned by Anheuser Busch Cos Inc. 

In its annual statement to shareholders in March, Anheuser disclosed it pays Ginnaire Rental, a company owned by August Busch III, August IV’s father, $407,611 in 2007 to lease aircraft. 

In a recent Q&A to shareholders, August Busch said the company had always “effectively contained costs compared to other domestic brewers”. 

Busch III’s son Steven Busch seems to be heeding that advice. Anheuser’s annual statement on compensation said that last year Steven Busch sometimes accompanied his father or piloted the aircraft “at no additional cost to the company”.

(Additional reporting by Bill Rigby in New York) 

(Photo from Reuters archives: A Dassault AviationFalcon 7X jet)