visits and launched formal and informal consultations before publishing its final report in 1958. The report made 51 recommendations on a variety of issues, including recommending that society's start selling products at market prices and stop expecting the dividend to compensate for high prices, whilst its final recommendation was that the movement should hold similar reviews "at least once a decade": this went unheeded until the 2000 commission was established. Despite being described by the 2000 commission as "prescient in its analysis, and right in nearly everything it recommended", the report failed to have significant impact for the movement, with most of the recommendations being ignored or brought about by circumstance rather than by free adoption. In its 1967 Regional Plan, the Co-operative Union concluded that "If the serious warnings of the Independent Commission had been heeded, the Movement would be in far better shape to withstand the impact of new problems which have developed". Instead, supermarkets such as Sainsbury's and Marks & Spencer emerged as serious competitors to the co-operative retail movement. Monks Commission Establishment The Co-operative Movement existed under the threat of demutualisation, whereby a society could be turned into a private company and its assets taken out of the hands of its members and under the control of private shareholders. The Co-operative Wholesale Society Ltd (CWS) was particularly attractive to "demutualisers" because of the size of its assets, turnover and customer base, and in 1997 entrepreneur Andrew Regan began making an attempt to demutualise the CWS. He made a bid of £1.2bn for the co-operative, which was rejected by the members but led to two senior CWS executives being dismissed, and ultimately jailed for accepting a bribe for an unrelated transaction via a company that CWS sold to Regan. The bid had the benefit of shining a spotlight on the Movement's weaknesses, and it came to realise that its best long-term defence was to operate successful co-operative businesses: that they must succeed "as [businesses], in terms of [their] performance – and as [Co-operatives], meeting [their] social goals". Combined with this, the UK's two biggest co-operative societies were in the early stages of merging. Co-operative Retail Services (CRS) had been ailing for some time, reporting an operating loss of nearly £60m in 1999, and its board and members recognised the benefits that would come from combining with the CWS - large reductions in operating costs could quickly be