Simon Dingemans, a corporate finance director at Goldman Sachs who enjoys a close relationship with Vodafone, has come top of Financial News' leading M&A dealmakers tables.

The tables rank individuals by the value of the M&A transactions announced in 1999 on which they played a senior advisory role. Not surprisingly, the top places are filled with dealmakers involved in telecoms transactions such as Vodafone's £83bn (E132bn) hostile bid for Mannesmann. Dingemans and his colleague, Jeremy Mead, led the Goldman team that advised Vodafone on its £33m takeover of Airtouch as well as its current bid for Mannesmann. That deal boosted the ratings for no less than seven investment banks that have managed to carve out a role on the world's largest takeover bid. The other large telecoms deal of 1999 was Olivetti's E75bn takeover of Telecom Italia and Mannesmann's £19.8bn takeover of Orange. Dan Dickinson, the co-head of European M&A at Merrill Lynch, who ranks seventh, primarily for his role as adviser to Mannesmann, was one of four Merrill Lynch bankers at the top of the list. Despite having had such a successful year in Europe in 1999, Dickinson expects European M&A activity to reach even greater heights in 2000. "About two-thirds of the transactions involving European companies are intra-European,' says Dickinson. "What you will see going forward is even more activity as European companies move towards deals involving companies from the rest of the world.' While most of those at the top would not have been there if not for the Vodafone and Telecom Italia deals, telecoms did not tell the full story in 1999. There were a number of exceptions, such as Michael Zaoui, Morgan Stanley's co-head of European M&A, who has built up an impressive ranking based primarily on his reputation and expertise in the French takeover market. Zaoui played a central part in nearly every major French takeover this year, including the BNP/SocGen/Paribas three-way takeover, as well as the TotalFina/Elf bid and counterbid scenario. His ranking will doubtless annoy his brother at Goldman Sachs, Yoel Zaoui, who is considered to be a somewhat less aggressive character than his brother. The leading dealmaker for 1998, Don Meltzer, slipped to number 25 in 1999 – despite being personally involved in five European deals with a total value of £73bn. Meltzer, on behalf of CSFB, could take a certain amount of pride in the fact that he has raised its investment banking profile up into the mega-deal category – having doubled its average deal size in a very short space of time. However, Meltzer dismisses this achievement, pointing out that the statistic is just a reflection of the increased M&A activity in Europe. "Doubling the average deal value just means that you have kept up with the market,' Meltzer says. "The real achievement has been that we have had a more active role in many of the bigger situations.' Many names in the list reached such heights for no other reason than the investment bank they worked for underwrote a large transaction, either in the Olivetti-Telecom Italia deal or in the TotalFina/Elf counter bid, which featured Europe's largest syndicated loan facility. Perhaps the most distinctive feature of 1999's dealmakers is their anonymity. With the exception of a few outspoken characters, the bulk of last year's bankers kept a very low profile and actively avoided courting publicity. Aside from the fact that most of them are too busy doing deals, prudence also plays a key part in their calculations. As any banker knows, "it's always the client's deal'.