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The French market has burst into life during the early summer, as deal-doers rush to complete transactions before the holiday season. The mid-market segment has been particularly active. Barclays Private Equity reaped an IRR of more than 60% from its partial exit from call centre business Webhelp, while ABN AMRO Capital won a hotly-contested auction for household goods retailer Findis.

Venture has also looked very healthy. Mobile television specialist DibCom raised EUR20m from a syndicate of venture capitalists led by investment bank Natixis, while R&D subcontractor Alyotech received an extra EUR10m and biopharma company Diatos raised a EUR9.4m fifth round. Investors have also renewed their faith in both in e-commerce (Vente-privee.com, Delamaison.fr, Ckado.fr and Sarenza) and in web 2.0 (Zlio and Bluekiwi).

Only two years after its creation, France's regulation-light market Alternext is proving to be a reliable exit route for venture and small-cap players, with on average two private equity-backed IPOs per month. A recent success was the IPO of wind energy specialist Vergnet, 14 years after it originally received venture backing, which was 16x oversubscribed.

Although France has so far largely been unaffected by the UK's taxation row, the country's government has turned its attention to golden handshakes and may begin probing into management packages, which many, including GPs, find excessive.