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Mouchel has wasted no time bringing on board a new CEO following the departure of Richard Cuthbert last week (see Mouchel CEO resigns on profits warning), appointing Grant Rumbles, a long-time Serco exec and its former COO, to the top job. Rumbles is being hired from testing, advisory and assurance services firm Exova, where he has been CEO since 2008. Prior to Exova, Rumbles spent 25 years at Serco, where he held various senior management roles, including his four year tenure as Group COO. He was also a board member of Serco from 2007 to 2008. So Rumbles clearly knows the BPO and support services industry well.
Along with the new CEO appointment, chairman Bo Lerenius will now step aside, and be replaced by non-exec David Sugden, who joined Mouchel in January. Sugden is a turnaround specialist - previously chairman of UK home shopping Findel, and of education company BPP Holdings, where he was involved in turning around both companies, including the eventual sale of BPP.
For the new management team the most urgent issue (of which there are many) is to resolve Mouchel’s funding structure, which looks even more precarious following the profits warning last week. Mouchel said the profit shortfall is likely to cause it to breach its lending covenants with its banks, and they have now appointed KPMG to look into this. As a result, Mouchel will now delay publishing its accounts for the year ended 31 July 2011, to 30 November 2011.
The upshot of all this is clearly more uncertainty over Mouchel’s future. Investors reacted by knocking another 8% off Mouchel’s share price - it is now down 92% year to date.
