Nokia has billed its decision to sell most of its handset and services business to Microsoft as the “next chapter”. But for many critics, it is the final episode in a Helsinki whodunit. To them, the perpetrator of this offence against national industrial pride is obvious. It is the Canadian with the smoking gun standing next to the still-twitching corpse of Finland’s best-known company: Nokia chief executive Stephen Elop.

He was accused in online comments yesterday of being, variously, a Microsoft “spy”, guilty of “sabotage”, having carried out an “inside job” to deliver Nokia to the US company where he once worked and to which he will now return.

Tips that he could succeed Steve Ballmer as Microsoft chief executive look improbable given his lack of success at Nokia – but the critics are unjust, for two reasons. First, Mr Elop was attempting an extraordinary feat of corporate strategy: to effect a radical turnround of a historic company for the second time in less than two decades. Second, Nokia is far from extinct.