Safe Hands Of Justin King, Sainsbury’s CEO, Stroked And Admired By Boris Johnson
After a couple of thoroughly crappy months for the 2012 Olympics, what with downsizing everyone’s expectations, Tessa Jowell admitting that we wouldn’t have even bid had we known a recession would happen, and financial adviser David Ross resigning after the Carphone Warehouse share scandal, Boris Johnson is trying to get things back on track. He’s going after Justin King, CEO of Sainsbury’s, to fill Ross’s shoes.
We saw a month or so ago that Sainsbury’s was doing really quite well amid the recession; King has taken the supermarket from crap expensive version of Tesco to winning blend of cheap basics and saliva-farming lust items. After his appointment as CEO, the supermarket has seen 14 consecutive quarters of growth, doubling profits and posting a three-year sales target of £2.5bn three months early. Earlier on in his career, he brought Haagen-Dazs to this country, which some would presumably see as befitting an instant knighthood.
Safe hands, then, which will just the kind of appointment Johnson badly needs to make after the scandal-plagued likes of Ray Lewis and James McGrath, both of whom resigned this year, and of course David Ross. Incidentally, another bit of Ross’s face got lost over the weekend as painter Jonathan Yeo, whose studio occupies a floor of Ross’s townhouse, has decided to pack up and go post-scandal, prompting speculation that Ross is selling up and moving on. The Mail also revealed how Ross had to mortgage bits of his property portfolio as security against borrowings from JP Morgan. Not sure he needs a bespoke Christmas appeal just yet though.
And in other Olympian news, Johnson is being urged by the New Local Government Network thinktank to say that if you win more than two medals at the 2012 games, then you’ll get a street named after you in London (presumably in the Olympic Village, assuming it actually gets built). Hate to be an awful cynic, but I doubt the aspirant sporting youth in Britain finds the prospect of having a street named after them particularly stimulating, compared with having some Vitamin Water named after them, along with a cheque for millions of quid named after them.
Posted by Ben Beaumont-Thomas in Hot Money | December 22, 2008 3:16PM |