Adds: British American Tobacco
Dec 4 (Reuters) - The following bids, mergers, acquisitions and disposals were reported by 1430 GMT on Thursday:
** British American Tobacco <BATS.L> plans to offload its stake worth about $776 million in India's ITC Hotels <ITCT.NS>, the company said, as it looks to reduce debt and exit a non-strategic asset. nL4N3XA0W4
** Kenya is selling a 15% stake in telecom operator Safaricom to South Africa's Vodacom in a deal worth about $1.6 billion, the companies and the finance minister said, as the government seeks to raise cash by offloading some state assets.
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** OpenAI has agreed to acquire Neptune, a startup that provides tools that help companies track their AI model training, the ChatGPT maker said on Wednesday.
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** Paramount Skydance <PSKY.O> has raised the proposed breakup fee in its bid to acquire Warner Bros Discovery <WBD.O> to $5 billion from $2.1 billion, Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the offer.
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** Howden is in talks to acquire New York-based specialist broker Atlantic Global Risk, according to people familiar with the matter, in a move that would mark another step in its aggressive U.S. retail expansion.
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** The low-carbon unit of Italian energy group Eni <ENI.MI> has agreed to buy some of the businesses of regional utility ACEA <ACE.MI> in a deal worth 587 million euros ($685 million), the two companies said on Wednesday.
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** Ryan Specialty has completed the acquisition of Toronto-based MGU Stewart Specialty Risk Underwriting (SSRU), the company announced on Wednesday.
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(Compiled by Rajarshi Roy, Pragyan Kalita and Prakhar Srivastava in Bengaluru)
((PragyanKalita@thomsonreuters.com))