Morgan Stanley has carved out a niche in a small but growing area of dealmaking, leading a new ranking of agents for European private placement transactions.

Rating agency Standard & Poor's has published its first European private placement league table. It's an "opaque market", the agency's analysts note - bonds or shares are sold to particular investors without a public offering - and the rankings are based on figures from 2014. Neither S&P nor Dealogic were able to provide numbers for the first half of this year.