The CEO of Galeria Karstadt Kaufhof (GKK), Miguel Müllenbach, will leave the group on his own after the end of the bankruptcy, Business Insider learned.
Müllenbach should lack the radiance, insiders report. On the employee side, Müllenbach was controversial from the start.
According to company circles, his successor is Olivier van den Bossche, currently Chief Sales Officer. The group did not comment on request.
At Galeria Karstadt Kaufhof (GKK) things are happening in quick succession these days. The group just had to announce the closure of almost 50 branches and the loss of thousands of jobs in Germany. Now Business Insider has found out that CEO Miguel Müllenbach will also lose his job. Accordingly, he should leave the group after the end of the bankruptcy on his own in a few weeks.
Reason for the separation: Insiders report unanimously that Müllenbach lacks the charisma to shape the future of GKK. The supervisory board also says that the GKK mother Signa also wants to send a signal to the employee bank: if almost 5,000 jobs are cut, then this must also have consequences in management.
Employee representatives were critical of Müllenbach right from the start
The employee side was critical of Müllenbach as CEO right from the start. They accuse the CEO of leading a company through bankruptcy for the third time. “In football you would say he’s relegated for the third time,” says a works councillor. Müllenbach worked in a managerial position at Karstadt in 2009 when the company had to file for bankruptcy. The first bankruptcy of GKK followed in 2020 and the second at the end of 2022.
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Müllenbach was promoted to the top post in 2020 as a replacement for Stephan Fanderl. He was previously CFO at Galeria Karstadt Kaufhof, and his work with numbers was valued in the company and by the owner, Signa. It is said from supervisory board circles that there was no alternative to Müllenbach as Fanderl’s successor in such a short time, because no one was as deeply involved in the matter of the department store as he was.
According to information from Business Insider, Olivier van den Bosche will be the successor to Müllenbach. He is currently Sales Director at GKK, knows the company well, after all van den Bosche ran Galeria Kaufhof between 2014 and 2017 as CEO. He later left the group and was most recently COO of the cosmetics brand Rituals in the Netherlands. In May last year, Signa boss René Benko brought the top manager back to GKK.
It has been said for a long time from supervisory board circles that Benko van den Bosche wanted to take the top position in the department store chain. But only when the protective shield procedure ends in a few weeks will the personnel at the top of the group be made official. When asked, the company did not comment on the plans.