So ends the saga of Orkla and Mecom. After attempting to get rid of its media arm for at least ten months, and attracting a lot of bad PR in the process, Orkla has sold the 19,97pc stake the company was forced to take in Mecom to finalise the sale of Orkla Media - cashing in a neat £25m profit. The deal leaves the troublesome child that once was Orkla Media on foreign hands entirely and marks a very timely exit for the Norwegian company. "I think they realised they would have attracted a lot of criticism for some of the unpopular decisions Mecom makes," Kjetil Haanes, an employee representative in what is now Mecom Europe, told NA24 Propaganda (in Norwegian).

Though Orkla has offloaded all its Mecom shares, Montgomery still has to repay a vendor loan note to the company.