Spar CEO Brett Botten to retire at the end of January 2023

South African retailer Spar has announced that CEO Brett Botten will leave his role at the end of this month.

Spar announced this development on Tuesday and said Botten will retire as part of a shake-up which will also see former chair Graham O’Connor leave the board after at the group’s annual meeting in February.

It is reported that Phumla Mnganga will also step down as an independent non-executive director after the meeting on 14 February – she served for 17 years.

BusinessTech Africa has discovered that Spar 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 accusations of price inflation in a Johannesburg store.

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.

While Spar defended itself for the allegations, CEO of Protea Capital Asset Management Jean Pierre Verster, believes that Tuesday’s announcements that both the CEO and the previous chair were leaving Spar meant the retailer was “cleaning a 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 argued that 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,” he said per Fin24.

In terms of replacements, the grocery and household goods store announced that it had appointed Shirley Zinn and Pedro da Silva as independent directors with effect after the annual meeting.

Da Silva previously occupied senior executive leadership positions internationally including as MD of Pick n Pay Retail in SA, while Zinn’s former roles include that of the head of human resources at Woolworths and at Standard Bank SA.

Zinn is also serving on the boards of Sanlam and Sanlam Life Insurance, as well as Spur and MTN SA.