ING sells its 51 percent stake in a wealth management joint venture to partner Australia and New Zealand Banking Group for $1.6 billion as the Dutch group slims down through asset sales.

ING is offloading assets to raise 6-8 billion euros, and is also selling its Asian and Swiss private banking assets. HSBC is the front-runner to buy the Asian private bank assets, sources tell Reuters.

In other M&A news:

Britain’s biggest pubs group, Punch Taverns, puts more than 300 of its worst performing pubs up for sale as it strives to cut its debt pile.

French state-controlled power group EDF could raise its stake in waste, water and transport firm Veolia to 13-14 percent as Veolia’s boss is set to go to EDF, French daily Les Echos said.

For deals reported by other media click here.

Like doting parents of teenagers who have spent their allowance and keep coming back for more, shareholders have so far been extraordinarily forgiving when stumping up cash to bail British companies out of debt. At some point, however, they will lose their patience and say “no”.

Housebuilders Barratt and Redrow are the latest to raise cash from shareholders via heavily discounted rights issues, joining a long list of companies who have gone cap in hand to investors for sums of more than 100 million pounds ($163.4 million) since the start of the year.

For now at least, everyone can feel good about the result. A rising stock market since March means shareholders can say they did the right thing in giving companies the cash needed to pay down debt, defend their credit ratings or write down previous corporate follies.

Like others before them, Barratt and Redrow say they’ll use the 545.5 million pounds and 156 million pounds they are raising to strengthen their respective balance sheets.

Companies have few avenues open to them to raise new funding now that banks have largely turned off the tap. The most creditworthy companies have tapped the bond markets, but others have no real option other than to turn to shareholders.

In doing so, they are effectively holding a gun to  investors’ heads. If they don’t get the cash they need to refinance debts, they risk breaching bank covenants or failing to meet bond payments. If that happens, shareholders will inevitably lose out.

The alternative is a deeply discounted rights issue. This allows shareholders to redeploy some of the cash they took out of the equity market during the worst of the financial crisis. If they don’t stump up, shareholders face having their stakes heavily diluted.

The recent rights issues have been remarkably similar. Of the 26 deals of more than 100 million pounds this year, the average discount to the theoretical ex-rights price (the price at which the new shares should trade) was 39 percent, according to data compiled by BNP Paribas UK Equity Capital Markets head Ben Canning. Of these, 19 had a discount to TERP of 38 to 40 percent.

So far, investors have been willing to overlook these hefty discounts and the rising fees paid to the underwriters and sub-underwriters. Bookrunners are taking a fee of 3.25-3.5 percent on deals of above 100 million pounds, well above the 2 percent they were charging a couple of years ago.

The banks argue that the fees reflect the increased risk involved in backing these cash calls given the extra market volatility. And with institutions who missed out on the early stages of the equity market rally still falling over themselves to invest, it is no wonder bankers are predicting more rights issues to come.

But at some point this gravy train will grind to a halt. A stock market correction would prompt investors to re-think their willingness to support future offerings.

If the fall is sufficiently sharp, underwriters may even find themselves having to make good on their commitment to buy shares the market does not want. It would probably be better if some investors were willing to say “no” before it gets to that.

If you want to take a bite out of Apple’s piece of the staggeringly huge (but difficult to quantify in $$$ terms) smartphone market pie, you’d better either have the magical new “thing” or be willing to spend to buy it.

As Anupreeta Das reports, Palm – one of the stalwart originals in the mobile handset space — has remade itself into a terrific target with the success of its Pre. Palm’s stock got a jolt this week on talk that Nokia could be considering a bid. But as she explains, Palm may prove to be too pricey a purchase, even for those with deep pockets.

Since introducing the Pre, Dell, Microsoft, Nokia and Motorola have been mentioned as possible suitors. If one of these cash-rich companies was to bid for Palm today, it would be targeting a stock that has quadrupled this year. Complicating matters, “details on how many units it has sold are skimpy, making it difficult to value the success of Palm’s turnaround story,” she reports.

Palm’s market capitalization is $2.4 billion. Based on the average 34 percent premium that technology, media and telecommunications companies have been sold for this year, according to Thomson Reuters data, this means a price tag of about $3.2 billion.

Dell is already in the early stages of buying up Perot Systems, but will still have nearly $7 billion in cash on hand should it choose to go on a spree. Microsoft, while a cagey customer, as shown in its dealings with Yahoo, has buckets more. For big tech players, the price itself is not the problem.

“To them, Palm is a thousand-dollar used model locomotive. Now you have to buy the other cars, and the tracks, and fake trees, etc. You have enough to pay for it, but you don’t even know if it works properly,” said a guy here at Reuters when the subject was being kicked around.

Canadian media firm CanWest Global Communications Corp will sell down its 50.1 percent stake in Australia’s Ten Network, worth about A$714 million ($620 million), in a move that could put Ten into play.

In other M&A news reported by Reuters and other media on Thursday:

* Chilean forestry group CMPC said it is in talks to buy a unit of Brazilian giant Aracruz for $1.4 billion, which would give it access to the world’s cheapest pulp producing market.

* Chinese solar wafer manufacturer ReneSola said it will buy Dynamic Green Energy Ltd for about $88.5 million, mostly in stock, expanding the arts company into the market for solar panels.

* U.S. pharmaceuticals company Abbott Laboratories has made an offer to buy the drug unit of Belgian conglomerate Solvay SA, competing with Swiss drugmaker Nycomed, the Wall Street Journal says, citing people familiar with the matter.

* Toyota will sell its brokerage unit to Tokai Tokyo Financial as part of efforts to consolidate resources into automobile operations, the Nikkei business daily reports.