Luciano Benetton leaves: “They betrayed me, there is a 100 million hole”
A vitriolic interview, the one given by Luciano Benetton, founder of the clothing group. Against “his” managers, guilty of hiding the truth about the financial statements.
The 89-year-old, in fact, left the company in 2012 “with the company in good health, with a turnover of 2 billion and a profit, even if logic says that we can always do better. Only after strong insistence from my brother Gilberto I have decided to return in 2018″. Because the group had difficulty finding a high-level management team. Now he is leaving the Treviso company again: “In summary, I trusted and I was wrong. I was betrayed in the true sense of the word. A few months ago I realized that something was wrong. That the photograph of the group that the top management repeated to us in the boardrooms was not real” he explained to Corriere della Sera.
With the CEO, who he never mentions by name in the interview, Benetton says that “he never asked me anything, neither he nor the new collaborators he brought in, among these five come from the commercial area of a company with a market tradition completely different from ours”. The company had a three-year plan for the tie that ended in 2023. But apparently it has fallen through.
“While we receive these first signals in council, given in an absolutely unconcerned way on their part, I realize that the numbers don’t add up to me and that the problem goes well beyond what they declared in September. Among other things, for a long time I had been feeling discontent inside and outside the company due to the arrogant attitude And not very capable of the new managers. Phrases such as “we decided and you must stick to it” which we are not used to hearing or using in the company, give the caliber of the new management team. Naturally, I firmly point this out to the “new ones” and in a board meeting I express my great concern for an economic trend that absolutely doesn’t add up”, continues Benetton.
At that point, Benetton says, “in one of the council meetings in the following months the bomb explodes, that’s what it was. They suddenly have a dramatic budget hole, a shock that leaves us breathless”. That is to say “around 100 million. However, everything that has emerged and is emerging since September ’23 is a disgrace.” And he accuses: “Either they are unprepared to the point of not being able to understand the fundamentals of the company, therefore in good faith but seriously inadequate for the roles they have held, or they voluntarily decided to keep the reality of the facts hidden, thus omitting valuable information, to the point where they could no longer hide the truth. There will be an investigation into this.”
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