On Tuesday, 13th April, at the inaugural Acquisitions Monthly Annual Awards dinner, Morgan Stanley was awarded Bank of the Year. Michael Zaoui, co-head of European M&A, collected the award.

In its awards edition, Acquisitions Monthly commented: "Without question, Morgan Stanley enjoyed its most successful ever year in M&A — not to mention investment banking as a whole — by harnessing global sector fire-power with regional strength…. Morgan Stanley advised on 26 deals worth £33 billion ($55 billion) in the UK, grabbing a market share of 37% and with it pole position in IFR Securities Data's UK public and private [league] table.

This was the first time a U.S. bank had topped the UK league; more striking was its dominance in UK public M&A, where it also claimed first position. Traditionally, the bulk of advisory mandates for U.S. investment banks in the UK have been attributed to inward investment from their U.S. clients; Morgan Stanley worked on a number of UK-UK transactions, demonstrating that blue chip PLCs no longer regard indigenous providers as their only option for executing Take-over Code transactions.

Dominance in the UK provided the ballast for pan-European supremacy, as Morgan Stanley enjoyed its best year in Spain and the Benelux region. Overall, it topped all of IFR's major European league tables, as well as pipping Goldman Sachs to the global title. It is already in the running for honors in 1999: late last year its pharmaceuticals team advised Astra, while it also had a hand in BTR-Siebe (now invensys) and BAe-Marconi. To repeat such a resounding success in 1999 would be unprecedented, especially with the overall quality of the competitive environment."

In addition, Morgan Stanley was Highly Commended for its role in advising on two transactions in the category of Cross-Border Deal of the Year: BP/Amoco and Texas Utilities/The Energy Group (Morgan Stanley client in bold).

The Judging Process

The Acquistions Monthly awards were founded in January 1996 — although 1999 is the first year in which they were accompanied by a formal presentation ceremony. The purpose of the awards has always been to reward excellence in corporate finance on a qualitative basis. While league table performance is an important judging criterion and is a performance benchmark, the awards give judges the opportunity to look beyond numbers and rankings and get under the skin of the deal. To ensure this was done with sufficient rigor, Acquisitions Monthly solicited corporate and intermediary, as well as invited independent individuals to join their judging panel from outside the magazine. All awards are based on transactions completed between January 1 and December 31, 1998. A shortlist of deals that were deemed to have achieved excellence during 1998 was created from an initial list of nominations. Overall winners in each category were then chosen from the shortlist.