Probably good news.
During his short tenure lost the company something like 75% of its market capitalisation despite additional Cap rises - Leon watched over an amazing destruction of shareholder value! Sp went down from $13 at his inthronization to something like $3.50 now. That's the story of his two and a half years at the helm - Ouch.
Though I don't think it was him alone being responsible for this amazing disaster ... many of the bad decisions leading into Synlaits trouble have been made already before his arrival:
The company allowed itself to get into a huge dependency on A2 milk which destroyed any risk diversification and allowed A2M to basically determine the conditions of any agreements between these two. SML always had a quite weak balance sheet (too much debt) and they invested as if the past growth rates of the past would guarantee future growth (which we now know, they didn't). Legal trouble at Pokeno (building a plant on property despite covenants preventing this) just demonstrated how light hearted both CEO as well as board have been happy to gamble with shareholder funds.
Leon's biggest mistake was probably to accept the job, but he clearly was not able to fix or even address the companies real issues. He invested instead his energy and the companies resources into painting the company pink. Maybe a nice colour for whoever likes it, but did he really get the priorities right?
Anyway - the same board who created the mess in the first place and who picked a clearly unsuitable CEO for the task at hand is now stepping up to fix the mess they created. Sounds a little bit like A2 Milk to me - anybody remembering the story with Jane and than the old CEO getting back and further running the company into the mud?
Sort of wondering how deep SML can go ... I am pretty sure we didn't reach the end of the downturn - yet.
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