London’s investment bankers, lawyers and accountants have collected more than £1.2bn in fees from takeover deals this year. The value of mergers and acquisitions involving UK-listed companies has jumped 175 percent to $132.9bn (£100bn), as private equity firms and overseas buyers buy up businesses on the London stock market.
The City calls this a boom. For the people who work at the companies being sold, it means someone else has bought the power to decide what happens to their workplace.
The most lucrative deal for advisers is the £10.6bn takeover of lab testing company Intertek by private equity firm EQT. It’s expected to generate more than £370m in fees. Morgan Stanley, Barclays and Deutsche Bank are working for EQT, while Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Cazenove and PJT Partners have been paid by Intertek. Whichever side wins the negotiations, the banks get paid.
JP Morgan has advised on 14 takeovers involving UK companies this year, worth a combined $89.4bn (£67.6bn). At boutique investment bank Evercore, senior dealmakers received about £2m on average, while its highest-paid member collected £16.2m. Partners at law firms Linklaters and Clifford Chance were paid averages of £2.5m and £2.3m respectively in the year to April.
Those sums aren’t a measure of how much useful work bankers and corporate lawyers do. They reflect their place in a system where ownership of a business can change hands for billions, and the people arranging the sale can claim a slice. Intertek’s labs, equipment and workforce were there before EQT made its offer. A takeover doesn’t, by itself, create a new lab or perform a single test. It changes who owns the business and who will control the wealth it produces.
Marx described this as the centralisation of capital: existing businesses are brought under the control of fewer owners through takeovers and mergers. Competition doesn’t preserve a world of small, independent firms. Larger pools of capital can buy companies outright, and the resulting concentration gives their owners still more power over production and investment. The City provides the finance and legal machinery for that process, collecting its fees as capital is gathered into fewer hands.
Private equity makes the class relationship especially plain. Its buyers acquire businesses because they expect a return. That return must ultimately come from the company’s future earnings, which depend on the work done by its employees. How a new owner pursues that return will differ from deal to deal; a takeover announcement alone doesn’t tell us that jobs will be cut. What it does tell us is that the workers have had no equivalent say in the sale, even though they’ll live with its consequences.
Much of the money buying British companies comes from abroad, particularly the US. That’s prompted anxiety about the future of the London stock market. But there’s little reason for workers to share the City’s nostalgia for keeping a company listed in London. A British shareholder’s claim on their labour doesn’t become less exploitative because it’s British. Nor is Britain simply a victim of foreign capital: its banks and law firms are taking enormous fees from arranging these deals. The City sits inside an international system of finance capital and profits from helping it operate.
The bankers are doing well at both ends of this process. Their takeover fees are rising, and so are their potential bonuses. Since the government scrapped the rule limiting bonuses to twice annual salary in late 2023, banks have been free to set their own caps. Goldman Sachs now allows bonuses of up to 25 times annual salary.
At the same time, the banking industry is pressing the government against higher taxes. JP Morgan boss Jamie Dimon has warned prime minister Andy Burnham and chancellor John Healey against raising taxes on banks in the 28 October budget, while industry body UK Finance has made the same case. The banks already pay a higher corporation tax rate than most companies, at 28 percent rather than 25 percent, as well as a separate surcharge on their UK balance sheets. They’re nevertheless arguing against contributing more while dealmakers collect multimillion-pound payouts.
Workers are living through a very different economy. Growth in average total earnings, including bonuses, was 3.9 percent in the three months to July. Millions of households are struggling with the cost of living while a single City deal can bring in hundreds of millions in fees. GMB national secretary Charlotte Brumpton-Childs pointed to the contrast between financial brokers’ pay and the position of those “while the people who keep this country moving struggle to make ends meet”.
Trade union leaders have called for a windfall tax on banks’ profits. The industry’s fierce resistance to higher taxes shows how hard it fights to keep even the proceeds it has already taken. The deeper division is over ownership itself. Workers produce and maintain the businesses being traded; shareholders sell them; financiers take a cut; and the buyers gain control of their future earnings.
Even some in the City are worried about where the takeover spree leads. As listed companies are bought and taken off the market, investment banks could lose future work advising on share listings and producing research. Just seven companies listed in London in the first half of 2026, raising £577m between them. Airtel Money’s planned listing may bring in a large new company, but it doesn’t change what this year’s figures show: the City can make a fortune from the shrinking of the very market on which it relies.
That’s capitalism’s logic in a particularly naked form. A business can be sold, stripped from the stock market and placed under new ownership, generating vast rewards for people whose names most of its workers will never know. The people who make it worth buying will still have to turn up for work the next morning.
