LONDON, March 2, 2006 – An innovative shareholder scorecard prepared exclusively for CFO Europe by management consultancy Marakon Associates has highlighted Europe’s 50 best- and worst-performing large, listed companies. Topping the list is Anglo Irish Bank, with a five-year total shareholder return of 53% — 50 percentage points higher than its industry’s average.

Unlike most shareholder scorecards which rank performance based on absolute shareholder return, the magazine’s inaugural "Company Edge Scorecard" places company performance in the context of peers. "Our rankings take into account the relative value creation — or destruction — of individual industries, revealing how a company’s management team has helped it perform against its rivals and deliver on investor expectations," explained Janet Kersnar, editor-in-chief of CFO Europe.

In addition to Anglo, six other European companies boast a five-year Company Edge score in excess of 25 percentage points. They are: Zardoya Otis of Spain (31 percent), Next of the UK (30 percent), Fortum of Finland (28 percent), Cepsa of Spain (28 percent), RAS of Italy (26 percent) and Dassault Aviation of France (26 percent). Together, the top 50 performing European companies generated more than 470 billion euros of excess value for shareholders over the past five years.

The three worst-performing companies, each with a five-year Company Edge score of -25 percentage points or worse are: Fiat of Italy (-32 percent), Bouygues of France (-26 percent) and Safran of France (-25 percent). Together, the worst-performing 50 companies in the scorecard destroyed more than 730 billion euros of shareholder value over the past five years.

Alastair Campbell, a London-based partner at Marakon who oversaw the research, noted that making it into the top 50 was no mean feat: "It’s about getting everything right — delivering structural advantage, playing to their strengths and mastering the basics."

For more information, see CFO Europe’s March cover story, "Peak Performers," at www.cfoeurope.com/displayStory.cfm/5571252.

About the Company Edge Scorecard:

The aim of the company edge scorecard is to produce a measure of corporate outpeformance among Europe’s largest companies. The starting point is a company’s total shareholder return (TSR) over a five-year period and a sector-adjusted TSR (the market cap weighted average of the TSRs for all the companies in its sector). So if a company’s five-year TSR is 12% and the sector adjustment is 3%, its Company Edge score is 9%. The excess value created is determined by multiplying a firm’s five-year Company Edge by its market capitalization on the start date of the survey, April 1, 2000. The resulting euro amount is the cumulative excess shareholder value created by the company between April 1, 2000 and March 31, 2005. The study size was reduced by the need for companies to have been listed for at least five years up to March 31, 2005, and was then narrowed down further by focusing on companies with a market capitalization of 4.5 million euros or more.

About Marakon Associates:

Marakon Associates is an international management consultancy that works with senior executives of large companies on the issues that most drive corporate performance and long-term value. The Economist has called it "a consultancy that has advised some of the world’s most consistently successful companies." Marakon has offices in New York, London, Singapore, Chicago and San Francisco.