SAO PAULO (Reuters) – The former CEO of bankrupt Brazilian retailer Americanas said on Tuesday the firm’s previous management had created difficulties in the disclosure of information about its situation and the succession process. Sergio Rial, who led the firm for less than two weeks before resigning after it unveiled accounting inconsistencies of about 20 billion reais ($3.9 billion), was speaking in a Senate hearing about the retailer’s crisis.
Current Americanas CEO, Leonardo Coelho Pereira, and the president of Brazil’s banks federation Febraban, Isaac Ferreira, also attended.
“I was extracting the day-to-day information drop by drop. There was no willingness to explain how this happened,” Rial told the Senate economic affairs committee, referring to the accounting problems that led the firm to file for bankruptcy protection in January. According to Rial, previous chief executive Miguel Gutierrez did not want him to attend a year-end management meeting. “The information was very controlled by him and his board,” Rial told the senators.
“Until December 26 it was not known prospectively what the result of Americanas would be in 2022 … to this day it is not known,” he added. Last week, Americanas postponed indefinitely its fourth-quarter of 2022 earnings report, initially scheduled for Wednesday.
($1 = 5.1897 reais)
(Reporting by Eduardo Simoes; Editing by David Holmes)
