No doubt, James Crean shareholders - who together with their counterparts in Smurfit are a particularly long-suffering bunch - will be delighted to see their company spending £7.3 million on taking over the Speediprint business in Leeds.

The Crean board has a long history of making wonderful acquisitions and investments and no doubt Speediprint will be another!

But more than three months after the annual general meeting, shareholders have still to hear a solitary word about Crean's much-trumpeted strategic plan to turn around a company whose shares have fallen from 716p way back in 1990, to 115p this week.

Nor are shareholders any nearer, it seems, to hearing when Ray McLoughlin intends to step down from the chief executive's job he assumed last December.

But nine months after combining the chairman and chief executive's job, Mr McLoughlin has still to produce a package aimed at restoring at least a portion of Crean's lost glory, and the sale of assets that will make up a fundamental element of that package.