Canadian cool

It's taken an eternity, but the BCE buyout is officially history. As a reminder, this was a plan by a club of private equity firms to acquire BCE (the owner of Bell Canada) with an enormous $35 bln in debt. The deal was toast when the auditors finally saw sense and pointed out that such a level of borrowing would render the firm insolvent.

Whilst the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan (the lead acquirer) will be disappointed, they shouldn't be. It was a crazy deal to do in any climate, and you have to wonder whether pension plans are the best qualified people to be doing direct deals (after all, if they were that good why aren't they working for a private equity firm?).

Of course, the real winners are the banks who had so unwisely signed up to this, and are now free from having to fund the deal. The fortunate trio is RBS, Deutsche Bank and TDC. You can almost hear the bankers bursting into song. All together now: O Canada...!