Finsbury holds on to lead position in July Deal Watch

The firm worked on deals worth £5.3bn last month, a £2.1bn increase on the value of the deals it advised on in June, although still shy of the £6bn of work with which the firm beat previous high-ranker Brunswick in May.

Brunswick and Finsbury benefited from advising on some of the largest deals during what was an otherwise relatively quiet month.

Finsbury worked as adviser to Laragrove Ltd on its £1.5bn bid for Debenhams, the second largest deal in the month of July.

Brunswick helped Barclays Bank on its £789m acquisition of Spanish bank Banco Zaragozano.

Although Debenhams recommended Laragrove’s cash offer of 425p per share backed by Permira, the department store has also said that it is considering a bid from a rival consortium, made up of CVC Capital Partners and Texas Pacific Group.

The Banco Zaragozano takeover makes Barclays the sixth largest bank in Spain.

Only two of the deals that Finsbury advised on were worth more than £1bn, while Brunswick has moved back into second place, having secured work on deals worth a total of £3.1bn, pushing last month’s challenger Hogarth Partnership back to the lower end of the top ten advisers.

Finsbury advised on six of last months’s top 20 deals by value, including the £1bn public offering of a stake in United Utilities.

Brunswick managed to work on four of the month’s 20 largest deals, another of which was advising Selfridges on Oxford Acquisitions’s buy-out of the upmarket department store company.

Citigate Dewe Rogerson’s work advising directories group Yell on its delayed £1.3bn initial pubic offering has helped propel the firm straight into third position after a two-month absence from the league table. The firm closed more than £2.3bn worth of business in July.

Citigate’s advance in July was Tulchan Communications’s loss, as the firm dropped from third position in June to fifth place, working on deals worth just £2bn in July – £600m less than in the previous month.

Financial Dynamics holds fourth position, working on deals of just over £2bn – a modest £200m increase.

Tulchan Communications also took a hit last month, bringing in £500m less than it did in June and slipping down the table from third place to fifth.