Africa-Press – South-Africa. Retail group Spar said on Tuesday CEO Brett Botten will be retiring at the end of January as part of shakeup which will also see former chair Graham O’Connor leave the board after at the group’s annual meeting in February.
Phumla Mnganga will step down as an independent non-executive director of after the meeting on 14 February after serving for 17 years, the group said, while it has also appointed two new independent directors with immediate effect.
O’Connor stepped down as chair in December, which followed a spate of negative publicity for the group, including allegations that it inflated the price of a store in Johannesburg.
Criminal complaints were also filed against senior executives of Spar, including O’Connor, in December amid allegations that the grocer falsely claimed in 2019 it was owed money in order to gain control over certain supermarkets.
In addition, News24 reported that two “fictitious” loans have been uncovered in a report compiled on behalf of Spar’s board, which was looking into allegations of unfair treatment and racism. The governance of the company has also come under fire in some quarters after O’Connor became Spar chairperson in March 2021, a month after retiring as CEO, which is at odds with the King Code’s recommendation of at least a three-year break.
Spar has defended the independence of the board, saying previously it had extensively debated the merits of appointing the former CEO to head of the board, while it has also said the negative publicity stemmed from a small minority of its store owners.
A network of independent retailers that trade under Spar’s brand and are supplied on a voluntary basis through its distribution centres, and it serves more than 2 500 stores across southern Africa.
Board pressure
Jean Pierre Verster, CEO of Protea Capital Asset Management, said Tuesday’s announcements that both the CEO and the previous chair were departing from Spar indicated that the retailer was “cleaning house after some recent revelations of corporate governance concerns”.
FNB portfolio manager Wayne McCurrie agreed that Spar had faced a great deal of bad press recently.
He said there were also “allegations of discrimination by Spar towards certain franchisees based on race and location”. While Spar had hired a legal firm to look into the matter, said McCurrie, it could not find any systematic proof of any discrimination based on race and location. However, by the grocer’s own admission, said McCurry, it had admitted there were faults in the way it did conduct its business and would be looking to address them.
While it had not specified what these faults were, he said these types of admissions did not augur well for the group, which had also facied questions about the independence of its chair.
He said the ongoing media scrutiny had likely created a lot of pressure for both O’Conner and Botten, adding that this had “clearly just been too much for them”.
“I have no doubt that we will hear more about why they are leaving. There will be an announcement, probably very soon, from Spar, because this doesn’t just ordinarily happen – that the CEO leaves at the end of the month and [the] chairman doesn’t put himself up for reelection. So clearly, they both came under pressure.”
New appointments
The group said on Tuesday it had appointed Shirley Zinn and Pedro da Silva as independent directors with effect from after the annual meeting.
Da Silva has held numerous senior executive leadership positions globally, including as MD of Pick n Pay Retail in SA, while Zinn’s former roles include that of head of human resources at Woolworths and at Standard Bank SA.
Zinn is also on the boards of Sanlam and Sanlam Life Insurance, as well as Spur and MTN SA.
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