The transaction in question like all the best deals involved an interesting basket of mis-priced assets, lots of late night meetings & your run of the mill Chinese billionaire who had lots of shall we say ‘connections’ to highly placed individuals in what was at that time termed “the Mainland”.

Anyway, late one Friday afternoon, the vendors called a full meeting of the various individuals that supposedly comprised their profession team in a vainglorious attempt to try & keep us focused on the deal & not the many liquid pleasures that lay in wait over the weekend. The chairman that the meeting, Mr Shouty, had shall we say, a bit of a reputation for being a tad errrrrrr volatile at times. To my mind & by any normal measure of human behavior he was completely phuquing certifiable but through the rose tinted spectacles of time, lets just say that too much sun & way way too many beers over the years had severely impaired his body’s ability to generate Serotonin.

So there we all were, suited booted sitting round the boardroom table each reporting on the progress that we were all making when it fell to a young analyst to comment on the meeting that he had had with the purchaser, earlier that day.

Somewhat controversially, he prefaced his report with the statement that said billionaire purchaser maybe didn’t have the funds to complete the transaction. This sent all of us bravely diving straight under the table as Mr Shouty went right off on one. After the dust had settled a little & Mr Shouty had come down from his low earth orbit the analyst in question justified his lack of funds comment because the purchaser had turned up to a meeting in a “copy Rolls Royce”. Apparently the car in question looked just like a Rolls Royce but was clearly a fake because instead of the Spirit of Ecstasy sitting atop the radiator grille, it had the letter ‘B’!