Beltway Biz

einventing M&ampA: Since Loral's got loads of cash and once was interested in acquiring Paramax, goes the joke within Unisys, they should just go for the whole company --and call it Paralysis.

Princeton's Edison Fund, which has a K Street office, pointed out in its newsletter that BTG's IPO marked the first in a decade for a systems integrator primarily in the federal market. Offered initially at 8, BTG's shares have been trading at 6 1/2 to 7.

Quiz show: What do Lou Gertsner, Michael Spindler, Larry Ellison, Scott McNealy, Charles Wang, John Sculley, Bill Gates and Steve Case have in common? They're all featured on executive trading cards that can be downloaded from Redgate Communications service on America Online. Long shelf life is a plus with the Florida-based PR firm --the latest calendar item highlights a Nov. 14 event, and there's still no response on a reporter's bulletin board to the plaintive query --"Why has nobody answered my question about security? I thought the topic was hot."

David Winstead, a former Baltimore-Washington Common Market executive who served as an initial president of the Challenger Center, is reported to have the nod as Maryland Gov. Parris Glendening's Secretary of Economic and Employment Development.

TechWorld, the D.C. real-estate complex conceived a decade ago as an office-cum-demo site for technology companies and subsequently leased to the GAO, finally joined Infomart in Dallas, Datamart in San Francisco and Inforum in Atlanta in seeking bankruptcy protection.

Seyfarth, Shaw's Acquisition Issues newsletter points out that the Pentagon's inspector general recovered $373 million in the first half of 1994 related to contracting fraud. But it doesn't indicate how much the IG spent doing that.