So what are they playing at? You would have thought First Active's management would have leapt at the opportunity to salvage some dignity from the fiasco of the company's performance as a public outfit by sealing the deal with Anglo Irish Bank. Indeed, if anything, the doubts in the market related both to Anglo Irish's strategic shift in sizing up a branch network and its wisdom in taking on a very difficult brief. Instead, we now hear that, for the second time, chances of First Active's shareholders salvaging something from the mess have come to naught . . . because of its management failing to agree on the disposition of management posts within any combined operation.

Given that opinion during the merger talks veered towards the view that the best thing First Active management could do would be to let someone else do the managing, you might have thought they would have taken the deal and gone off to hone their skills in a less public environment . . .