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Embattled retailer Bed Bath & Beyond needs to move quickly to shore up its executive ranks after the sudden death of its chief financial officer, an expert told The Post on Monday.
Gustavo Arnal jumped to his death from the 18th floor of his luxury Manhattan apartment building early Saturday. The 52-year-old executive recently announced the company secured a $500 million financing deal to help it restructure while addressing declining sales.
“The company is in crisis,” bankruptcy attorney Eric Snyder of Wilk Auslander told The Post on Monday. “Now that there is a vacancy for the CFO, the logical next step is to bring in a restructuring officer to either restructure the company with the creditor groups or sell the company through an organized bankruptcy process.”
The retailer, which is trying to stave off bankruptcy, is expected to name Arnal’s successor before the markets open on Tuesday, according to a Wall Street Journal report, amid a leadership vacuum and potentially damaging litigation.
The C suite has seen an exodus after losing its chief executive, Mark Tritton, and its chief merchandising officer, Joe Hartsig, on June 29. Last week, Chief Operating Officer John Hartmann stepped down.
Separately, Arnal was named in an Aug. 23 insider trading lawsuit against the company alleging that he misled investors. The complaint, filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., also named activist investor Ryan Cohen, who dumped his shares in the retailer last month to bag $68 million.
The complaint alleges that “disclosures made by certain of our investors about their holdings…were materially false or misleading,” the company said in a securities filing.
Bed Bath & Beyond said it’s in “early stages of evaluating the complaint” but believes that the “claims are without merit.”
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