It’s official. General Motors will wind down operations at its loss-making Swedish unit Saab after an attempt to sell it to small Dutch luxury carmaker Spyker Cars failed. Things were already looking dire for a deal weeks ago. GM said early in the month it would consider offers for Saab until the end of the month and move to close the Swedish unit then if it appeared that it couldn’t be sold. Given it couldn’t save Saturn or Pontiac, Saab’s prospects for a GM-engineered solution had been slim at best.

GM said the move was not a bankruptcy or forced liquidation process. Saab will satisfy debts, it said, including supplier payments, and Saab operations will be wound down in an orderly fashion.

Niche luxury carmaker Koenigsegg was another last-ditch possibility that fell through for the Swedish automaker, which did manage to sell some assets to China’s BAIC. Saab has around 3,000 staff, and about the same number in other businesses are going to find the Scandinavian winter particularly cold this year.

Friday’s highlights from Reuters:

The energy, finance, technology and healthcare industries are expected to be the hottest areas in a dealmaking market that in 2010 is likely to expand gradually from this year’s depressed levels. M&A totals $1.968 trillion so far in 2009, down 32 percent from full-year 2008 and down 53 percent from the record high in 2007, according to data from Thomson Reuters

A dizzying recovery in financial markets this year has upended the usual pecking order for fee-making in investment banking and turned the bonuses flowing from those fees into political dynamite. The shape of the fee pool has really changed materially over recent years,” said Simon Warshaw, co-head of investment banking for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) at Swiss bank UBS, ranked fifth for global equity capital markets (ECM) issues and fees this year. Read the  story here.

And in news elsewhere:

The disposals Lloyds has agreed to as compensation for taking state aid were a “very fair deal” but it has no plans to sell the assets off soon, the banking group’s chief executive told the Financial Times.  Read the report here.