Hindsight is a wonderful thing indeed.

With that 20/20 clarity provided by the rear-view mirror, Simon Thomson and his fellow former board members at Capricorn Energy's headquarters in Edinburgh might have chosen to handle last year's siege by activist hedge fund Palliser Capital a bit differently. A touch more conciliatory, shall we say.

Whether a different tack would have changed the course of events is wide open to debate, but as the protracted battle wore on, there was a growing sense of intransigence in Capricorn's public refusal to acknowledge widespread concerns among investors - first in relation to the company's abandoned merger with Tullow Oil, then in the ultimately doomed deal with Israel's NewMed Energy.

Perhaps in private Capricorn's former board members knew exactly what Palliser's end-game was, and they really, really didn't like it, so much so that any sign of even grudging acquiescence became verboten. That will no doubt be a topic for Mr Thomson's memoirs, should he choose to write them.

READ MORE: Capricorn picks new CEO to lead shareholder payouts

But the parable of hindsight at Capricorn doesn't end there.

Having won the battle to oust Mr Thomson and his retinue at the beginning of February, Palliser's board of directors pulled the plug on the deal with NewMed, opting instead for their own strategic review. But if the war was to get the best return for shareholders, that has arguably been lost.

At the end of March, BP and the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) announced plans to buy half of NewMed, which by then would have been in the process of absorbing Capricorn. The $4 billion net asset value of NewMed implied by the bid is some way ahead of the $2.6bn estimated by Palliser when it was campaigning against the tie-up between Capricorn and NewMed.

As one Capricorn shareholder who supported Palliser told Reuters on the condition of anonymity, "in hindsight we would have taken the shares from the NewMed merger, but we didn't know BP/ADNOC would offer a 70 per cent premium (for a stake in NewMed) ... hindsight is a beautiful thing".

Shares in Capricorn are trading nearly 10% lower this afternoon despite pledges from the new executive team to return $575m to shareholders within the coming year. The stock was last hovering around 219p, putting it further adrift of the 271p on offer from NewMed.

That said, no amount of schadenfreude will likely ease the pain of the roughly 120 Capricorn employees in the UK who will soon be out of a job as the company offloads assets to focus on operations in Egypt.