Double congratulations to Michael Cleary and David Maxwell. The senior partners of Grant Thornton and Robson Rhodes have not only tabled the biggest accountancy firm merger since Price Waterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand in 1998 (we'll leave aside the post-Enron, shotgun marriage of Deloitte and Andersen), but they also managed to keep it under wraps until this weekend. No mean feat, given the general leakiness of most partnerships.
It's an interesting and significant deal, though it will ruffle fewer Big Four feathers than some commentators have suggested. The FT's Alphaville column remarks this morning how 'the Big Four accounting firms face a threat to their dominance in the blue-chip audit market' once the deal is completed in July.
Other papers have taken this at face-value too, albeit adding a caveat or three about the relative size of the combined firm and Ernst & Young, the smallest of the Big Four..
But will blue-chips suddenly rush to the new Grant Thornton for audit services? I doubt it, though that may well come in a trickle rather than a flood in time.
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