Clearly the era of openness and accountability is alive and well at Pernod Ricard's elegant headquarters in Paris, after the French bosses of Irish Distillers (IDG) ended the policy of separately reporting IDG's results from the main Pernod Ricard results. Obviously the competition from John Teeling's whiskey giant in Cooley must be getting so intense that Pernod can't tell us any more how IDG is doing.

From the piffling amount of information that the Pernod results tell us, it is pretty clear that IDG remains an excellent investment and that the £280 million (€356 million) Pernod paid for the Irish drinks group 10 years ago was a steal. A steal from IDG's shareholders, of course, given that those shareholders were prevented by the courts from accepting a much higher offer from Grand Met. Still, that's all history.

While Irish whiskey has been a major profit generator for Pernod in the past 10 years, its influence within the French group is likely to be diminished given Patrick Ricard's comments last week that he can afford to spend 14 billion francs (€2.13 billion) on acquisitions if the French government lifts its veto on Pernod selling Orangina to Coca-Cola.