Who wins in a share buyback?

When companies go into the market and buy back shares, there are usually mixed feelings.

Is it a sign that the company simply doesn't have any ideas on how to spend excess money? Or more positively, is it a genuine mechanism to put some money back into shareholders' pockets while simultaneously boosting earnings per share?

Whatever the benefits for shareholders, when shares are bought or sold there is one sure-fire winner - the brokers who handle the deal.

Bank of Ireland's broking subsidiary Davy and London broking blueblood Cazenove handled the bank's recent £270 million buyback of 52 million shares. How much did all this realise for Davy and Cazenove in terms of fees and commissions?

That's hard to gauge as fund managers are notoriously coy about telling people like Current Account what sort of arrangement they have with stockbrokers.

But even a commission of 0.5 per cent would have given Davy and Cazenove commissions of £1.35 million on the shares they bought from institutions for Bank of Ireland - not to mention the fee they would have negotiated with the bank itself to handle the buyback.

And as for Cazenove, the London bluebloods think so much of themselves that market sources believe that they would never deign to consider a cut-price deal.