THE London Stock Exchange has been paying fees of £2 million a month to a range of professional advisers helping the exchange with this spring’s twin takeover approaches.

The LSE presented its figures for the year to end-March yesterday. The figures included a £6.8 million exceptional item for professional fees, covering the period from just before Christmas, when Deutsche Börse made a conditional 530p-a-share approach valuing the business at £1.3 billion, until the financial year end.

The LSE’s main advisers are Merrill Lynch, the investment bank, Cazenove and Lehman Brothers, its joint brokers, Freshfields, the law firm, and Finsbury, the PR consultancy.

Some of these were paid hourly and others were given lump-sum payments at the outset, Jonathan Howell, the LSE’s finance director, said. In addition, some are on substantial “success fees”.

The LSE was unwilling to discuss its two bid approaches. One, from the Börse, was withdrawn in March. The other is from Euronext, which operates four continental exchanges, but no firm figure was given. The Competition Commission is studying both approaches and is to report in September.

Clara Furse, the LSE chief executive, was asked about reports that she was holding out for £6 a share or more from Euronext, which has indicated that it can make greater cost savings than the Börse could from a merger with London. “We’ve never put a £6 number out there,” she insisted.

However, Ms Furse said that independent analysts’ reports had put a stand-alone value of between 415p and 460p on the exchange. In addition, Euronext had indicated it could make €150 million (£103 million) in annual cost cuts, equivalent to £3 a share.

Ms Furse did not eleborate further. However, if those cost savings were shared equally between the bidder and LSE shareholders, that would put a value of 565p to 610p a share on any eventual Euronext bid.

LSE shares rose 8½p to 471p. Euronext is seen as the only likely bidder, after the forced departure of the Börse’s chairman and its chief executive, announced last week. Analysts believe that the LSE board would be embarrassed if any Euronext offer came out close to the 530p offered by the Börse, which was rejected.

The LSE was announcing a bullish set of results. Operating profits before exceptional items and goodwill amortisation was down £900,000 at £82 million, hit by tariff cuts imposed by the Office of Fair Trading during the year.

The company was encouraged by a rise in the number of its terminals operated by professional investors, up by 5,000 to 95,000 and the first increase in three years, and a doubling in the number of new issues coming to market since last year.

A 5p final dividend takes the total to 7p, up from 4.8p, ahead of some analysts’ expectations. The one disappointment was the performance in the Netherlands, where the LSE has been trying to steal equities trading business from the local exchange, run by Euronext. Ms Furse had spoken of market share of 20 to 30 per cent but over the year it averaged only 2 per cent.