I don't really know much about stock manipulation but I have a line of thought that may explain some things. Please, however, correct me if I'm off base! It seems that someone wants to keep the SP down and the only logical explanation I can think of is they want it low so that a potential offer could be lower than if there's a crazy run up on the stock leading in to the offer?! Is it possible that a suitor has a number of people that own shares (in an attempt to accumulate a large voting percentage) and they're just trading them back and forth to one another? They've got these big ask blocks up and they seem to kinda get picked at but it stands to reason that if one suitor has a group of people that own shares they can manipulate the share price almost at will! How else do you explain volume over 200k but no movement on the sp?