The beauty parade for probably the most lucrative advisory job ever has been going on all this week as executives of about 10 Irish and international stockbroking and investment banking houses have presented their wares to the committee which will decide who will advise the Government on the sale of its Telecom stake.

Never mind the Greencore and Irish Life privatisations or Irish Permanent being floated, the Telecom flotation next year will dwarf any other recent corporate event on the Irish stock market.

How much the Government will raise will depend on how the markets perform over the next year, but selling off a quarter of Telecom should earn an absolute minimum of £700 million and conceivably more than £1 billion. There is huge demand now for telcommunications stocks and that is unlikely to change over the next year.

Whoever gets the job to advise the Government and act as broker to the flotation stands to get more than £20 million in fees, but in Telecom's case they will have to work for their money, with the flotation certain to involve an underwritten offering of shares, which is likely to be heavily biased towards the small investor.

With institutions likely to be underweight in a stock that will make up 6 or 7 per cent of the ISEQ index, the after-market to the Telecom flotation will make the after-market to the Irish Life, Irish Permanent and Norwich Union flotations previously the biggest in terms of Irish shareholder numbers seem like a minor country fair.

Trooping up to Government Buildings this week to present their wares were, of course, the big four in Dublin Davy and IBI, NCB, Goodbody and ABN-AMRO (together with its partner Rotschild). Touting for the international business were international heavy-hitters like Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Warburg and Dresdner Kleinwort Benson.

Expect a decision next week.

Of course, the ones who lose out for the Government work on the flotation, will probably have a second chance when the Telecom itself looks for its own set of advisers, brokers and investment bankers in Dublin and London. This job might not generate the sort of one-off fees of the Government work, but it will still be a high-profile brokership which will generate steady fee income over a long period, if not the hefty once-off fees that the Government adviser and broker will get.