GE Antares, a unit of GE Capital, said it served as administration agent on a $555 million loan for TricorBraun. The loan will serve to to refinance TricorBraun’s outstanding debt and make a distribution to shareholders of affiliates via dividends and stock repurchases, the statement said. GE Capital Markets served as joint lead arranger and [...]

Tomorrow is January 8, and for many GE Capital employees, that means D-Day.

peHUB reported in December that the GE Capital and its mid-market lending subsidiary, GE Antares, had suspended a planned round of planned layoffs until January 8, in order to implement a new, lower severance package plan. We haven’t been able to confirm specifics, but rumors are that the severance package may be less than two weeks salary for each year of service.

Perhaps the pitiful severance package isn’t surprising, given the pressure on financial firms to curb executive pay. But since GE has not recieved any TARP money yet, that’s hardly a valid excuse.

Yesterday peHUB reported that GE Antares would delay its rumored layoffs until the New Year. Today, we found out why. Thanks to a tip from my Buyouts colleague Ari Nathanson, it appears the mid-market lender and its parent company, GE Capital, plans to lay off members of its staff in one fell swoop in early January (we hear Jan. 8, to be exact).

The initial layoff plan for GE Antares was to occur in two waves, with one taking place last Tuesday and one in January, multiple sources said. However, parent company GE is in the midst of changing its corporate severance policy to provide smaller packages for 2009 layoffs. The conglomerate’s legal team told GE Capital to make all the cuts at once, to avoid discrepancies between the severance packages in the two waves of layoffs.

Because GE Antares hasn’t finalized its layoff list, the firm will have to lay off both groups in January, likely with the new, lower severance package, one source said.

Layoff rumors have plagued GE Antares ever since last month, when its parent company, GE Capital, announced plans for $2 billion in cost savings.

But employees of the mid-market lender can rest assured their jobs are safe for the remainder of the year, GE Antares spokesman Ned Reynolds told peHUB.

Reynolds said no layoffs have taken place this month and no layoffs will occur in December. This conflicts with a recent report from The Deal, which stated the 120-person business would cut 20% of its work force the week of December 8.

I’d also heard those rumors but Reynolds assured me that GE Antares has not and will not lay off any employees this month. “I’m not sure what was true a week ago but it’s not true today,” he said.

In fact, the firm expects to close 10 to 15 deals in the fourth quarter. Christopher Williams, a founding partner at Madison Capital Funding, called to clarify that after I wrote some apparently ambiguous comments on middle market lending pullbacks.

So let it be known: Madison Capital has cash to spend. The firm has not narrowed down its deal criteria over the last few weeks, as I had written. The only change, Williams said, is that Madison Capital is pushing for the absolute latest financial performance numbers on companies. “The last thing we want to do is book a company that we haven’t