Happy days for Investec

The whooping and hollering that is faintly audible this week around the top of Harcourt Street in Dublin is probably the corporate finance team at Investec pouring themselves another glass of bubbly.

I hear they are chuffed with life after two major deals they were working on got over the line this week.

Investec were long-time restructuring advisers to Spar-owner BWG, which sold an 80 per cent stake to a South African investor this week.

In conjunction with their colleagues in London, they also worked on the €1.16 billion sale of Tipperary engineering outfit Kentz, which was rubber-stamped on Monday.

Happy corporate financiers? Now there’s a reliable indicator of a recovering economy, if ever there was one.