London: Nestle investors have called for chairman Paul Bulcke to step down over the departure of a second chief executive in just over a year, the Financial Times (FT) reports.
Shareholders told FT the dismissal of former chief executive Laurent Freixe and the way investigations into his conduct were handled had exacerbated their concerns over governance at Nestle and led them to question Bulcke’s decision-making.
“I don’t think Bulcke will move on before April but he should have left when Mark Schneider was forced out,” Alexandre Stucki, founder of AS Investment Management, which represents founding family investors in Nestle, told the newspaper last Saturday.
Nestle did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
The Swiss food giant abruptly dismissed Freixe at the beginning of September for failing to disclose a romantic relationship with a subordinate.
Freixe’s removal came a year after predecessor Schneider suddenly departed and two and a half months after Bulcke said he would step down next year.
Schneider had been only the second outsider to take the top job in Nestle when he joined the company in 2017.
He made a series of acquisitions and championed Nestle’s push into products with higher margins.
People familiar with the matter said Schneider left the company after his blunt management style clashed with the company’s consensual corporate culture and growth slowed in the latter part of his tenure.
A Nestle spokesperson told FT the two chief executives’ departures were unrelated and that Freixe’s conduct was a clear breach of its code of conduct.
Bulcke, a 70-year-old Belgian and Swiss national who has been chairman of the board since April 2017, joined Nestle in 1979 and served as the company’s chief executive from 2008 to 2016.
Support for Bulcke has been ebbing away due to doubts about Nestle’s recovery after the pandemic, investors told Reuters in July, with sales volumes at the world’s largest maker of packaged food flagging in 2023 as it increased prices to offset rising raw material costs.
In April, Bulcke was re-elected with 84.8% of the vote, a substantial drop from the nearly 96% he received in 2017. — Reuters
