The week before Christmas the telephone rang on my desk. It was the chief executive of a small public company who was in town without a lunch date. Accepting last-minute hospitality is never a problem, and I nipped over to the City of London to perch on a bar stool and eat a cheese and pickle sandwich (so very not me), intrigued as to what he was up to, miles from his headquarters and at a time of the year when he had no results or company announcements to make.

It turned out that he was putting the final touches to a plan to take his company private. I shouldn't have been surprised – after all, 96 companies across Europe took themselves private last year, up from 73 in 2002, according to research firm Dealogic. This exodus has been put down to several factors, including the relatively cheap cost of money, the extent of the armoury of the venture capital industry and the existence of kdisaffected shareholders kso fed up with management that they are prepared to accept offers. In the UK alone, almost $10bn disappeared from the stock market, more than twice the amount that came into it from new listings.