Families of ICIS with constant total Milnor number

We show that a family of isolated complete intersection singularities (ICIS) with constant total Milnor number has no coalescence of singularities. This extends a well-known result of Gabriélov, Lazzeri and Lê for hypersurfaces. We use A’Campo’s theorem to see that the Lefschetz number of the generic monodromy of the ICIS is zero when the ICIS is singular. We give a pair applications for families of functions on ICIS which extend also some known results for functions on a smooth variety.