And Dutch lawyer Peter Wakkie, who has run the New York City Marathon four times, will need a sustained sprint to accomplish his new assignment: cleaning up corporate governance at Royal Ahold, the Netherlands’ scandal-plagued supermarket group, in the two years that he’s given himself for the task.
“By then, we will have a transparent company with rigorous internal controls, accountable management and, I hope, a clean legal slate, making my position superfluous,” says Wakkie, who was recently named chief corporate governance counsel at the world’s third-largest supermarket company by new CEO Anders Moberg.
The 55-year-old Wakkie, a former managing partner of corporate law firm De Brauw Blackstone Westbroek in the Hague, says he’s been given wide authority to carry out his mission. He was named to Ahold’s seven-person executive board and has an expansive mandate to overhaul the way Ahold’s 25 operating companies conduct business. “My role is much broader than simply making sure we have an adequate number of independent directors and the right supervisory board structure,” says Wakkie, adding that “what gives me the right experience for this job is that I can handle litigation, mergers and acquisitions and the nitty-gritty details of international corporate law.”
Of course, Wakkie has hills to climb. He will be dealing with a class-action suit filed by U.S. investors as well as probes by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the U.S. Justice Department and the Netherlands’ public prosecutor into the accounting irregularities that Ahold’s U.S. subsidiary used to overstate earnings by $856 million.
