Bed Bath & Beyond has named a new permanent CEO amid a tumultuous year for the company.
On Wednesday, the mass retailer announced that interim CEO Sue Gove has been tapped to takeover the role in a fulltime capacity.
Gove was appointed to the position in June after former CEO Mark Tritton was pushed out after just three years, and two months after its CFO died by suicide.
Before taking over as the interim leader earlier this year, Gove served as an independent director on the company's board.
At the time, the interim chief executive said that her goal was to deliver 'improved results' for the company, which has seen huge financial woes and scandals over the past six months.
Sue Gove has been appointed as permanent CEO of Bed Bath & Beyond after taking over the position in an interim capacity back in June
Gustavo Arnal, 52, was facing a billion dollar lawsuit just one week before he died for allegedly inflating the price of Bed Bath and Beyond shares in a get-rich-quick scheme
Arnal jumped to his death from the 18th floor of a 57-story building in Manhattan's Tribeca in September
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Share'Top-tier execution, careful management of costs, greater supply chain reliability, prudent capital spending, a stronger balance sheet, and robust digital capabilities will all be important to our success,' Gove said in June.
Before joining the retailer in 2019, Gove worked with several other major corporations, including Golfsmith International Holdings, Zale Corporation, and Alvarez & Marshal. Her positions with those companies ranged from president to senior advisor, according to her bio on Bed Bath & Beyond's website.
Gove obtained her bachelors of business administration in finance from the University of Texas at Austin.
'We are pleased to announce the appointment of Sue as Chief Executive Officer. Sue is the best person to serve at the helm of and continue leading the Company,' said Harriet Edelman, Independent Chair of Board of Directors.
Gove has more than 30 years of experience in business, according to her bio on Bed Bath & Beyond's website
'I look forward to continuing our important work alongside our highly engaged management team and Board as CEO. At Bed Bath & Beyond, we have never been more strategically and culturally focused, and I remain dedicated to executing on our back-to-basics philosophy, accelerating our performance, and focusing on financial returns,' Gove said in a statement released Wednesday.
Shares in the company were down 10 percent Wednesday morning leading up to the stock's opening.
Additionally, Bed Bath & Beyond has seen its stock fall a whopping 64% this year.
What Gove has done since June
Secured financing for a 'first-in-last-out' facility
Helped to grown Bed Bath & Beyond's rewards program to 8 million users
'Realigning the Company's organizational structure'
Making an exchange offer for the Bed Bath & Beyond's senior notes
The rebalancing of assortment and inventory positioning
Moving along partnership plans with buybuy BABY
<!- - ad: https://mads.dailymail.co.uk/v8/us/news/none/article/other/mpu_factbox.html?id=mpu_factbox_1 - ->AdvertisementThe company's market cap currently sits around $423 million, placing it in the 'small cap' designation. A market cap refers to a company's value of all a stock shares added together.
The company was also embroiled in a media frenzy less than two months ago when former CFO Gustavo Arnal jumped to his death from New York City's J'enga' builidng.
At the time, Arnal was being sued for artificially inflating the company's stock price in a 'pump and dump' scheme to sell off his shares at a higher price, DailyMail.com revealed in September.
Arnal was listed as one of the defendants in a class action lawsuit brought by a group of shareholders who claim they lost around $1.2billion.
The lawsuit, filed in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia on August 23, claims Cohen had approached Arnal about a plan to control shares of Bed Bath and Beyond so they could both profit.
As part of the plan, the lawsuit claims, Arnal 'agreed to regulate all insider sales by BBBY's officers and directors to ensure that the market would not be inundated with a large number of BBBY shares at a given time.'
He then allegedly issued 'materially misleading statements made to investors regarding BBBY's strategic company plans, financial condition... and reports of shares holding and selling' to help increase share prices.
By the time Arnal sold over 42,000 shares in the company in August, it was valued at $1 million, according to MarketBeat.com.
The lawsuit was then filed just one week before Arnal took his own life by jumping from the 18th floor of the famous 'Jenga' tower in lower Manhattan's Tribeca neighborhood.
The class action lawsuit was brought by Virginia resident Pengcheng Si on behalf of all those who purchased Bed Bath & Beyond stocks between March 25 and August 18.
Arnal plunged to his death from the 18th floor of the swanky so-called Jenga building in Manhattan's Tribeca neighborhood (pictured)
Arnal, right, was accused at the time of providing misleading statements and omissions to the public in order to keep the share prices high
They are now seeking damages for the alleged 'pump and dump' scheme, claiming Cohen offered to purchase a large stake in the company, including call options on more than 1.6 million hares with prices between $60 to $80.
In exchange, the suit alleges, Arnal would ensure that insiders would not flood the market with the stock.
He did so, allegedly by making 'materially misleading statements and omissions' about the company's financial standing in an effort to artificially inflate the share price,' the suit says
'Through mid August 2022, BBBY appeared — from the company's public statements and financial reporting to be a successful turning-around company,' it alleges.
But in reality, it says, Arnal 'blatantly misrepresented the value and profitability of [the company] causing BBBY to report revenues that was fictitious [and] announce publicly that the company is successfully on the way spinning off Buybuy Baby to 'unlock full value' of this 'tremendous asset.'
Buybuy Baby, though, was not actually doing well financially, the lawsuit claims.
Then on August 16, Cohen filed a document to the Securities and Exchange Commission saying he owned 9,450,100 share, including 1,670,100 shares under certain call options.
On August 16, Cohen filed a document to the Securities and Exchange Commission saying he owned 9,450,100 shares, including 1,670,100 shares under certain call options
It also claimed he held onto his April call options that would only begin to pay out if the stock hit $60 a share before January 20, 2023.
He was soon granted three seats on the board of the company, the lawsuit alleges, but had actually sold most of his shares in the company at that point.
Instead, the lawsuit claims, Cohen 'submitted [the document] for the purpose of creating [a] buying frenzy of BBBY stocks so that Cohen can finish selling his shares at [an] artificially inflated price.'
Stock prices rose 75 percent that day, the lawsuit alleges. But unbeknownst to share holders, it claims, that same day, Cohen also filed a form signifying his intent to sell the remainder of his shares and call options.
It was not disclosed to the public until the market closed the following day, when shares tumbled from a record high of $30 per share to around $22.50 a share.
Then after Arnal and Cohen filed a form saying they sold all their shares on August 16, the stock down 45 percent to $16.16.
It then continued to plummet to $8.78 on August 23 — down more than 70 percent from its high of $30 a share. By September 4, Bed Bath and Beyond was trading at just $8.63.
The lawsuit also claims that as the CFO, Arnal knew about Cohen's false filings with the SEC.
The chain is ditching its strategy of focusing on private-label products as it seeks to improve its finances after months of losses and stock prices falling
It further claims they discussed their exit strategy with JP Morgan Securities LLC before they sold off their shares.
It says they 'have done so for self-serving, improper and bad faith reasons, namely a desire to profit from the sales of their BBBY shares' and 'have violated their fiduciary duty by making false filings, issuing misleading statements and pumping and dumping BBY shares.'
The suit then claims JP Morgan Securities aided and abetted the operation 'to launder over $110 million worth of illegal insider trading proceeds.' DailyMail.com has reached out to Bed Bath and Beyond for comment.
Arnal's stock dump came the same day a 20-year-old college student made $110million by selling all of his Bed Bath and Beyond stock - but he did so just before the retailer's stock price slumped 23 percent after its second-biggest shareholder indicated plans to sell his entire holding.
Jake Freeman, an applied mathematics and economics major at the University of Southern California, invested in nearly five million Bed Bath & Beyond shares at $5.50 a share in July, spending a total of $25 million with the help of a wealthy pharmaceutical investor uncle.
As a result, he became a minority shareholder by owning around six percent of America's largest houseware goods specialty stores as it became the latest ailing retailer to see a surge in its value thanks to the ongoing 'meme stock' boom.
That sees amateur investors snap up stock in companies seen as past-their-best, helping to drive the share price up and making some lucky stockholders who sell at the right time millions of dollars.
Freeman, whose family resides in the New York City area, then roughly sold more than $130million worth of stock on August 16 similarly to Arnal, after the retailer's stock price surged to $27 a share.
Arnal's death came at a difficult time for the company as it faced high inflation and a sagging economy. The company had announced plans to close 150 stores, of its roughly 900, and lay off 20 percent of staff just two days before Arnal's death.
Arnal reportedly did not say a word to his wife at their New York City apartment before he decided to take his own life earlier this year
'While there is much work ahead, our road map is clear and we're confident that the significant changes we've announced today will have a positive impact on our performance' Gove said on a September conference call.
In a statement earlier this year, Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData, said that stock prices and earnings failings were responsible for Tritton's firing.
Saunders pointed specifically to Tritton's decision to focus on private-label products at Bed Bath & Beyond, a move he brought over from his time at Target.
'In our blunt view, this was a cosmetic reinvention — copied from Target — with very little substance behind it,' Saunders said. 'It is little wonder that it has quickly fallen apart.'
The managing director continued, saying that the company has: 'been run into the ground and a change of management is the only way of restoring some credibility with investors.'
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