DIGEST
Salomon Smith Barney, the brokerage arm of Citigroup, said it would buy the investment-banking business of Schroders, one of Britain's biggest investment-banking firms. The $2.2 billion deal thrusts Salomon into the forefront of advising European corporations, as the number of transcontinental deals accelerates. And the deal doubles the size of Citigroup's relatively small United Kingdom investment banking operation.</br></br>El Paso Energy agreed to buy Coastal Corp. for $16 billion in stock and assumed debt, expanding a natural-gas pipeline network that already is the biggest in the United States. Adding Coastal's pipelines to its own will help El Paso's plan to expand in electricity sales by making it easier to build power plants near major markets, Ronald Kuehn Jr., El Paso chairman, said in a statement.</br></br>JDS Uniphase, the world's largest maker of fiber-optic equipment parts, agreed to buy E-Tek Dynamics for $15 billion in stock to alleviate shortages in capacity and make new products faster. San Jose-based E-Tek's main products are found in equipment that phone companies increasingly are using to boost the capacity of fiber- optic networks to handle the growth of Internet use.</br></br>Mariner Post-Acute Network, the nation's second-largest operator of nursing homes, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, blaming federal cuts in Medicare reimbursement. The Atlanta-based company, which runs more than 400 nursing homes nationwide, said the 1997 Balanced Budget Act had cut its Medicare reimbursement by $115 per nursing-home resident. Two other large long-term care chains-- Louisville-based Vencor and Albuquerque-based Sun Healthcare Group-- have filed for bankruptcy protection in the past six months.</br></br>Coca-Cola said Jack Stahl will become the beverage giant's new president and chief operating officer. Atlanta-based Coca-Cola said it intended to elect Stahl, who currently leads the soft-drink maker's operations in the Americas, to his new position as second-in- command at the company's April 19 board of directors meeting.