Friends Provident Shareholders to be sold out?

By sheer coincidence (or foresight?) your author bought a few FP shares during the darkest days of the credit crunch. It looked like a nice bet at a time when the banks were shaky and there was no light at the end of the tunnel (yet). So when talk about a 'rapprochement' between the FP board and management and Resolution started again during the past few days my blood started to boil about this sell-out by the shareholder representatives. By looking at the FP chart any idiot (only a strong word will do here!) could see that the share is building a bottom formation and that the shares are still in seriously cheap territory. Of course, news flow is still poor - but otherwise the shares would be flying. So why sell now to a predator? If management is not up to the task it could be changed (again). And the unnamed institutions (and fellow-travellers in the media) that push management and the board to talk to Resolution, are they blind or do they really want to sell out at the bottom (or for a short-term flip if they were lucky and bold enough to buy during one of the downwared spikes in the winter months)? Maybe the Institutional Shareholders are really not the right forum to oversee corporate governance and should be limited to play in the secondary markets.