Volkswagen, the largest shareholder of both MAN and Scania, favours setting up a new holding company into which both truckmakers would be injected, treating the deal as a merger rather than a takeover.

VW's supervisory board last night repeated the carmaker's call for Germany's MAN and Sweden's Scania to sit down and negotiate following the former's €10.3bn ($12.9bn) hostile bid for the latter. It ruled out backing a hostile counter-bid from Scania for MAN for the next four weeks and said it would support MAN's offer if it received 56 per cent of voting rights without VW's stake - meaning MAN would have to win over Investor, the investment vehicle of the Wallenberg family and Scania's second-largest shareholder. Scania and Investor have both rejected MAN's offer.