JD Sports Fashion will complete the overhaul of its top executive team this week when it raids the owner of the Comparethemarket price comparison site to appoint its new finance chief.
Sky News has learnt that the London-listed retailer has finalised the appointment of Dominic Platt, who is currently chief financial officer at privately held BGL Group.
His recruitment will reunite him with Regis Schultz, the new CEO of JD Sports Fashion, with whom he previously worked at Darty, the French retailer.
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Mr Platt is understood to have handed in his notice at BGL, with his arrival at JD Sports likely to be confirmed in a stock exchange announcement in the coming days.
He will replace Neil Greenhalgh, who joined the company in 2004 and had been CFO since 2018.
The latest phase of JD Sports’ boardroom overhaul has emerged during a frenetic period for one of Britain’s biggest retail groups by market capitalisation.
The company saw its shares rise by more than 1% on Tuesday after announcing a £450m deal to buy Groupe Courir, a French-based retailer with operations in countries including Spain and Belgium.
In the past year, it has appointed a new chairman – Andy Higginson, the former Tesco executive who went on to chair grocer Wm Morrison – and a new chief executive, as well as several non-executive directors.
The company also said on Tuesday that it had moved to tidy up the ownership structure of some of its European subsidiaries.
JD Sports’ leadership overhaul came after a torrid period during which Peter Cowgill, its long-standing boss, stepped down amid a series of boardroom disagreements.
Since the appointments of Mr Higginson and Mr Schultz, the company has announced a series of ambitious growth targets which they aim to deliver by accelerating investment in its global retail network while selling non-core brands.
The company is majority-owned by Pentland, the family-controlled group which manages a portfolio of brands, including Berghaus, Lacoste and Speedo.
Shares in JD Sports closed on Monday at 164.55p, giving it a market value of £8.4bn.
A spokesman for the retailer declined to comment.
