How the CEO of Sears has been driving his company into the ground - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#15061091
https://www.businessinsider.com/sears-f ... ces-2017-1

He is totally out of touch with reality. He has made his managers too afraid to tell him the truth; he doesn't want to hear it.

He's also raided his own company's real estate assets, transferring them over to another corporate holding entity he controls, at discount prices below going market rates. If the allegations of lawsuits brought on by Sears shareholders are true, he has basically been stealing billions from the company to line his own pockets. Maybe he doesn't actually care so much about the wellbeing of the Sears company, just wants to ravage it for all it's worth.

A real Wall Street shark.

He can conveniently blame the death of his company on online competition from Amazon, but in this economic climate, Sears should not be struggling. Per capita retail spending is actually slightly up from what it was before the Recession, and rising rents cannot explain the problem either since Sears actually owns (or used to own) a large amount of its stores.

Sears stores are going out of business right and left, all their brand name appliance names are being sold off, and no one is buying from their online site.

Of course, the way he's set up everything, even if his company goes under, he still wins.

This just sounds like another case of private equity using leveraged buyouts to parasitically raid publicly-traded companies, leaving big companies a hollowed out shell of their former selves and screwing the other shareholders.


By the way, who are these shareholders that are getting screwed?
It's mostly older retired people with pension funds. Public teachers, for example. The state has set up a pension fund system for them, with investments in corporate stock like Sears, even if these teachers do not know it.
You could (indirectly) own Sears stock without even knowing it, if you have a mutual fund in your retirement savings investments, or if you are a public employee and they have set up a retirement pension system for you.
If enough of these stocks go under, then they'll have to modify the terms of the pension system and reduce your retirement payments.
#15061105
Donna wrote:That's kind of the point. Companies bring in guys like these near the end of a corporate life cycle to milk the firm for shareholders, not to rescue it or restructure it (which is probably impossible with a company like Sears).

I think you missed the point.
It doesn't look like he did this so much for Sears shareholders.
He did this for the shareholders of a separate corporate fund he holds a much larger personal stake in.
Which is why there is a lawsuit by a group of Sears shareholders against him.

It's debatable whether Sears was really "destined to die" if he had not been the one in charge. It's also extremely questionable whether the deals he set up between Sears and the other corporate entities he owns a stake in were truly beneficial for Sears. Certainly there was a big conflict of interest.

There's a difference between owning a company and milking it for all its worth to maximize shareholder profits, versus what this CEO did. Looks like his decisions as CEO may be causing the company to self-implode and bleeding it dry, sucking it out to another company with different shareholders that he owns.

Of course since Sears was already facing financial difficulties, it's difficult to say how much this CEO caused what has happened to Sears, how much he made it worse, and whether (or how much) that was intentional.

If I can use an analogy, it's like being a doctor and trying to save a patient suffering from blood loss, but meanwhile you're also a vampire and sucking blood out the side. You're trying to save the patient, but you have other ulterior motives as well, which may cause the patient not to survive.
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