A deluge of stock and business deals were predicted when Alistair Darling announced that capital gains tax would be increasing from 10% to 18%, but as the deadline for the new regime passed this week the deal flow did not quite meet the CGT hype.

Dealmakers said the CGT change might have adjusted the timetable of deals, but that in most cases transactions closed before the 5 April deadline were already underway before the chancellor announced the higher rate.

‘Things have been bubbling along and some private equity houses have been working day and night to beat the deadline, but most of these deals have been underway for sometime. CGT simply crystallised the deadline,’ Ernst & Young private equity partner John Cole said.

David Brooks, head of mergers & acquisitions at Grant Thornton, said there had been ‘more talk than practice’.

‘The deals that have been done ahead of 5 April were already cooking in 2007 Q4. Some deals have been brought forward, and in some cases owners have taken cash out of the business by buying back shares, but most deals have not been driven by the deadline,’ Brooks said.

A similar trend appears to have emerged with listed companies. A number of high profile executives have disposed of large tranches of shares ahead of the deadline.

Lord Sainsbury passed on 92 million shares to Innotech Advisers, a company he controls; departing British American Tobacco executive Kenneth Clarke sold his shares in the company; and Sir Ken Morrison moved shares he held in Morrisons into family and charitable trusts.

Yet for at least two of them it would seem that the CGT rate was never the main reason for some of the share transfers.

Morrisons said Sir Ken’s share deals were not driven by the CGT change and that the tax change only affected the timing of the deals.

When Clarke, the former Conservative chancellor, sold his shares in March it was just eight weeks before he was to step down from the BAT board anyway.

Research by Directors Deals, an organisation that tracks director dealings, said that directors were actually buying rather than selling shares in the lead up the CGT change as they took advantage of a weak stock market to pick up shares in their businesses on the cheap.

The scenes of frantic CGT deal hysteria predicted by business lobby groups have, it would seem, failed to materialise.

The relatively calm lead-up to the CGT transition will come as a relief to Darling, but he shouldn’t feel too smug just yet.

‘If I was negotiating to sell a business in time to beat the April deadline, I wouldn’t be in the strongest position,’ Brooks remarked.

If the new CGT rate hadn’t been introduced so swiftly, perhaps we would have seen more CGT-driven deals after all.