The first-ever chief executive of the John Lewis Partnership is having his role axed as part of a reshuffle under Jason Tarry, as the new chair accelerates a turnaround plan only weeks after taking the reins from his predecessor, Sharon White.
JLP, which owns the Waitrose supermarket chain and 34 department stores, said Nish Kankiwala had agreed to step back as chief executive, a role created 18 months ago under White’s direction.
The company said in a statement that the axed role and reshuffle reflected the “significant progression of the transformation, particularly over the last two years”.
Kankiwala will become a non-executive adviser to the board by March 2025, where he is expected to support Tarry.
The company said Kankiwala had signed up to the job under a two-year contract that would be served in full. But the role would then be axed rather than filled by another candidate.
“Given the work on the operating model for the business, the role of CEO will not be directly replaced and Jason [Tarry] will chair the executive team, as well as the partnership board,” the company added.
The announcement comes weeks after White handed the role of chair to Tarry. She will continue as an adviser to the former Tesco boss until the end of December, on her full pay of £82,500 a month in basic salary.
White’s departure caps off several challenging years for the group, having dealt with the upheaval of the coronavirus pandemic followed by the cost of living crisis. In January, it emerged that the company was considering cutting as many as 11,000 jobs over the next five years. While the group returned to an annual profit in March, it did not pay its staff an annual bonus for the third time in four years.
Tarry spent three decades at Tesco and helped the grocer’s turnaround under the former chief executive Dave Lewis after an accounting scandal. He is expected to continue his review of the partnership’s operations, including its department store chain, which is up against a structural change in shopping habits, as well as the company’s foray into financial services and build-to-rent properties, which together made losses of £16m last year.
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Commenting on the decision to axe Kankiwala’s role, the head of John Lewis’s nominations committee, Rita Clifton, said: “We created the CEO role at the beginning of 2023 because of the scale of the transformation and intense level of commercial focus needed in such unprecedented market circumstances.
“We asked Nish to move across from his non-executive director role to take on this new role of CEO for a concentrated period. We are deeply grateful that he agreed, and for all that he has delivered for the partnership in this particular phase of our transformation.”
Kankiwala said it has been the “privilege of my life to lead the partnership as CEO during this period of intense transformation”.
