Somebody else who has been toying with the thought of an MBO is Joe Moran, whose IWP group has been savaged by the market. Stephen Vernon might bemoan Green's treatment by the market, but IWP has suffered an absolute mauling with the share down from €5.93 in early 1998 to the current level of around €1.65.

As the market has knocked the shares back, IWP has responded in a variety of ways - including Joe Moran spending £8.6 million of his own money to buy shares while other directors have also dug deep to buy shares.

The group has also bought in a few million shares over the past year and sold off a batch of non-core businesses.

Apart from being an Irish midcap, IWP also suffers from being a distinctly unsexy sector and its portfolio of products ranging from firelighters to Jeyes fluid to cosmetics is not something that's going to set the average fund manager's eyes alight with anticipation and expectation. Even the news this week that IWP's main rival in the British household products business, McBride, has received a bid approach has failed to lift the sector.

Unfortunately, it has to be said that solid but dull, profitable old economy companies like IWP have little future in the brave new world of the third millennium stock markets. The flock to large cap Eurozone stocks, the dot.com hysteria, the euro, oil prices - you name it - have conspired to ensure that shares like IWP are going to struggle to get out of pitiful mid-single figure ratings.

It's time for Joe Moran to admit defeat on this one, get onto his bankers and venture capital pals and buy the company out!