First, a declaration of interest. In February, the publishing company behind Financial Director was acquired by Incisive Media, a B2B magazine group that exited the stockmarket when it was taken private by the large and long-established private equity group Apax Partners. I mention this in case you think that my experience of private equity owners in any way colours what I’m about to say.

The private equity arena has received a lot of bad press in recent weeks. Some of it may well be justified, though I would argue most of the mud that sticks probably relates to individual companies rather than the financing sphere itself. So whatever the strategies at organisation such as the AA or Saga may be – or, for that matter, the logic of bringing two such groups together in a merger – is really an issue for their management, their customers and their owners. It’s not difficult to think of customers of quoted companies, family-owned businesses or even mutual organisations that have had cause to complain about their treatment, but it has got little to do with the ownership structure of such businesses and more to do with whether they are making clever decisions. Private equity certainly has no monopoly over disgruntled customers.

The tax issue is interesting, as private equity groups typically throw more gearing at businesses than most quoted companies would regard as healthy or prudent. Interest on the debt burden is tax-deductible, true enough. But three things happen as a direct result of that. Firstly, it seems to me that if the interest payment is tax-deductible, then some lender somewhere has taxable interest income: gearing changes the locus of the tax burden so a more holistic approach would seem to be necessary.

Secondly, the interest burden focuses the corporate mind on servicing the debt and growing the business: you do not want to backslide and run into default, so there’s a vibrant emphasis on creating the cashflow to stay out of trouble. And sure enough, the statistics seem to show that private equity-backed businesses outpace their listed company counterparts.

Finally, if the tax effect of gearing is to roll up annual profits into lightly taxed capital gains, then surely that means that it is private equity that has a longer-term, value-creation agenda, and not the short-termist, shareholder appeasement that can be found in the earnings-oriented public arena.

It seems inevitable, however, that one consequence of all the hoo-ha is that the ‘governance-lite’ regime of private equity will change. There will unquestionably be demands for more transparency so that stakeholders have a clearer picture of what is happening. This may even lead to a stripped down Combined Code, compelling private equity-backed businesses and their financiers to jump through more hoops in an attempt to ensure that the right deal-making decisions are being made in the right way, and for the right reasons.

In many ways, this would be a shame. After all, Britain is blessed with a regime that regards the market as the best regulator – and nowhere is that regulator tougher than in private equity.