I’d love to have been a fly on the wall at the Kerry Shareholders’ Alliance meeting last week. No less than nine co-op board members landed in – that’s one-third of the board.

The two starkly different views of the future of Kerry were robustly exchanged. The board believes the shareholders’ alliance to be a small, unrepresentative but very vocal group, intent on cashing in on its investment in the co-op. This, the board believes, is undermining the co-op at the very moment when it is finally standing up to the plc on behalf of suppliers – next week sees the start of the oral hearings of the “13th payment” arbitration process regarding the leading milk price.

The newly retitled Kerry Co-op Shareholders’ and Suppliers’ Alliance, for its part, is saying that the board is on a dangerous path and does not have the backing of shareholders to acquire processing or agri-trading assets.

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The current postal consultation is dismissed as entirely inadequate.