PARIS/LONDON (Reuters) — Louis Dreyfus Commodities has announced that newly appointed chief executive officer Mayo Schmidt will not take up the post.
The move forced the global trading group to resume the CEO hunt it first launched in April.
The former head of Viterra had been due to start Jan. 5 after Louis Dreyfus nominated him at the end of November in the latest stage of a corporate shake-up at the 163-year-old family-owned business.
“Following a more detailed analysis of the terms and conditions of their planned employment relationship, Louis Dreyfus Commodities and Mr. Schmidt have jointly decided not to proceed with the engagement,” the company said.
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“The search for the CEO of Louis Dreyfus Commodities will resume immediately.”
Whatever the problems were, they appear to have come to a head in the last week of December, given that Schmidt stepped down from the board of Canadian fertilizer company Agrium Inc. Dec. 22 ahead of his planned arrival at Louis Dreyfus.
Traders and analysts had said that Schmidt’s record of building up Viterra through acquisitions before overseeing its sale to Glencore fit the plans of owner Margarita Louis-Dreyfus, who has overhauled the group since inheriting control from her late husband, Robert, in 2009.
To keep pace with the company’s competitors, Margarita Louis-Dreyfus has raised the possibility of a share listing or acquiring a partner and has overseen the group’s first forays into bond markets.
The appointment of Schmidt, 57, had also been in keeping with Louis Dreyfus’s preference for an external candidate.
