When Compliance Matters spoke to Farkas he was slightly upbeat about the immediate future.

"Late March saw the EU and UK agreeing the text of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that creates a framework for voluntary regulatory co-operation on financial services. The MoU will establish a joint UK-EU Financial Regulatory Forum that will discuss financial services. This could help unlock some 'limited equivalence' decisions, thereby allowing British firms to access the EU market. I believe that the forum’s activities will include “informal discussions on decisions to adopt, suspend or withdraw equivalence." The latest noises out of France are that they want to discourage it and withhold authorisation.

are opening up outposts there and moving there all the time, with the aim of doing work in Dublin and then pushing it towards their London offices, i.e. subcontracting work in Dublin out to lawyers in the UK. Large US corporates have used Dublin a lot. Dublin is so much closer to the UK than other EU centres. If you read the legal press, every week there's another law firm putting more resource into its Dublin office."

When asked whether Ireland's favourable corporate tax rate was instrumental in Dublin's good fortune, Farkas replied: "I don't think the tax driver is the critical one. It's not unhelpful, of course. It's just that Dublin is so much closer, moving's easier for human capital. The English language is important. Since the UK had its referendum in 2016, City firms have had lots of outposts there."

Compliance Matters brought up the fact that British regulations before 1973 (the date when it joined the Eurropean Economic Community, later the EU) were generally terse and pithy, in comparison with European regulations which are usually complex and interminable. Farkas thought that "we may go back to a better way of doing things."

He added: "In the last 18 months when I've looked at regulation, the FCA has accepted that instead of dynamic alignment, you can even forget about striving for equivalence. Theresa May used to love the EU. Bailey has really changed his tune over the last 18 months. His pronouncents are now hostile. He's actually said that regulators need not strive for equivalence. This has been reinforced by the senior partners at KPMG and PwC."

Returning to the theme of the French Government pouring cold water on British applications for 'equivalence,' Farkas observed: "No firm will invest huge amounts of money in equivalence if equivalence can be revoked on the whim of a single member state, or because of an election to please people."

* Alan Farkas can be reached on +44 (0)20 7031 3782 or at farkas.alan@dorsey.com