A flurry of telecoms and other deals announced in the second quarter results season this week have offered some relief for mergers and acquisitions (M&A) bankers in Europe, where takeovers across all sectors are down 41 percent this year.

But potential buyers, such as private equity funds, have struggled to persuade European banks to shed non-strategic assets at knockdown prices even as they strive to bulk up capital and meet stricter international rules.

Thomson Reuters data showed overall financial sector M&A deals, which includes those by businesses such as banks, insurers and asset managers, this year are the slowest since 2002. Bank M&A has declined 58 percent from 2012, while insurance M&A has inched up 4 percent.

Even with this week's $2.3 billion acquisition of commercial bank Capitalsource Inc (>> CapitalSource, Inc.) by banking holding company PacWest Bancorp (>> PacWest Bancorp), the year-to-date figure for the whole sector is 25 percent below 2012.

Morgan Stanley (>> Morgan Stanley) is top of the investment banking league tables for advising on financial M&A this year.

Global fees for all M&A activity in the first half of the year were $8.3 billion, down 16 percent from a year ago, Thomson Reuters data showed earlier this week.

(For more details on the week's investment banking data please click: http://share.thomsonreuters.com/PR/IB/Scorecard260713.pdf)

(Reporting by Kylie MacLellan; editing by Patrick Graham)

Stocks treated in this article : PacWest Bancorp, CapitalSource, Inc., Morgan Stanley