Numis’s management and shareholders will no doubt be happy enough with the 70pc premium the German lender is paying.
Even if there are lots of opportunities for cross-selling corporate financial services, it will be a struggle for Deutsche to make enough money to justify the price it is paying, or to hold onto clients once the brokerage is run from Frankfurt.
The more important question, however, is this: How comfortable do we feel with Deutsche owning a bigger slice of the City?
Let’s take a look at its record over the last few years. In 2017, it paid $7.2bn to the US authorities to settle claims over its role in the subprime mortgage crisis.
In the same year, there was another $600m settlement over allegations of Russian money laundering.
It was fined another $2.5bn over its role in Libor manipulation. In 2015, it was fined $250m for its role in breaking sanctions on Iran.
It was fined $150m in New York for its relationship with the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. In October last year, prosecutors raided its German offices as part of an investigation into tax avoidance.
The list goes on and on.
Of course, every major bank gets into trouble occasionally, and a few clients will turn out to be questionable.
And yet it is hard to escape the conclusion that there is, to put it mildly, something concerning about the culture of a company where the rules are broken so often, and where the fines run into tens of billions.
Nor is Deutsche exactly a darling of investors.
In the last decade the share prices have fallen by more than 90pc and it has been through a succession of chief executives none of whom have ever come up with a convincing rescue plan, nor a way of reviving its fortunes.
