Like the odour of spilt milk in a car, or feline faeces upon one’s shoe, the tiresome bollockery that is the MAN-Scania-VW merger never quite seems to fade.

Our nostrils are forced to twitch once more by this report, which tells us that Sweden's securities council has given Volkswagen permission to raise its stake in truck maker Scania without needing to make a bid for the whole firm.

We reported the comments a few weeks ago of VW CFO Hans-Dieter Poetsch, who told the world that: “It is hardly possible to deeply realize synergy potentials on a basis of pure cooperation.”

This use of seemingly random words confused us at the time, and a number of MAN people at the recent TGS/TGX launch appeared to be similarly bemused by Poetsch’s musings. Maybe he’s working up a Haiku.

But what else is going on remains very unclear. MAN rather seems to have given up on Scania, and a couple of its board members seem rather embarrassed to talk about the matter, preferring – quite naturally – to point out that the German OEM is likely to hit RoS numbers of 9.5 per cent this year by itself, thank you very much.

And so VW’s actions would now seem likely to be unwelcome, not just in Sweden, but also in Munich. A very strange way to be going on.