Buy-out volumes in Britain are still sliding, Germany has reclaimed second place from France, while Italy is climbing back up the rankings. That is the patchy picture across Europe painted in the latest Leveraged Buy-out Report from Initiative Europe, a research house.

It concludes that the industry is "entering a period of tentative recovery", thanks to the booming popularity of secondary buy-outs, the once-controversial but now-accepted practice of shuffling assets between private equity houses.