By 1996 Brush had been sold off by BTR to FKI and in turn, in July 2008, FKI was to be acquired by a private buyout company called Melrose. Melrose has grown fast and is today forging ahead with a hostile opportunistic and undervalued bid for GKN offering just 1.49 of its own shares per GKN share, a figure that places a value on its FTSE100 target company shares of 430.1p each and values GKN overall at £7.4 billion. The bottom line for me is that whichever future course of action takes place – GKN is separated into two distinct units, a strategy that its management has stated it intend to adopt, or acquired by Melrose or someone else, broken up and then the divisions perhaps sold off to foreign owners, the UK will undoubtedly lose out. Companies such as GKN matter to the UK economy and in a post Brexit world, we need all that we can get. Although there may be no hard and fast rule, my understanding is that Melrose strategy aims to own businesses that it acquires for between three and five years.