Before Christmas, IMA chairman Dougie Ferrans put the spotlight on the murky world of investment banking fees. His report on what companies have to pay in order to ensure that they can raise new equity capital via rights issues captured a lot of attention. Rightly so, because it demonstrated that underwriting fees paid to banks have been rising while the associated risks have been falling. And it is shareholders – ultimately ordinary people’s pensions and savings – that pay for it.

Most tellingly, we found out that the fees paid on rights issues are on average more than 10 times the total annual remuneration of the Board. Yet while enormous attention is paid to the latter, there has been very little focus on these fees.