ADM shareholder calls for CEO to leave as probe drags on

It’s been almost a year since Archer-Daniels-Midland Co. disclosed a probe into its accounting practices that wiped out $12 billion from one of the world’s largest agricultural commodities traders.

Now, a shareholder and former executive at a company owned by ADM is calling on chief executive officer Juan Luciano to step down, citing the lack of transparency about exactly what happened and how it will be fixed.

In a social media post, Hartwig Fuchs said ADM didn’t do enough to reverse the share loss and that the Chicago-based company “doesn’t communicate any valuable statements.” Fuchs was board chairman at Toepfer International when ADM owned about 80% of the German trader (it now owns all of it). He was also CEO of Nordzucker AG, one of Europe’s largest sugar producers.

“If a highly paid CEO of such an important company cannot manage to provide clarity within a few months — i.e., fully clear up the scandal, communicate with full transparency about what went wrong and what will be done in the future, regain investors trust and, above all, protect the company from long-term damage — then he has to go,” Fuchs said.

A spokeswoman for ADM declined to comment.

ADM in January disclosed an investigation into accounting practices at its nutrition unit, a business that makes ingredients for humans and animals that Luciano was betting on as the future of ADM. Chief Financial Officer Vikram Luthar took the brunt of the blame, agreeing to resign.

But less than 10 months after the scandal that sent shares plunging by a record 24%, the commodity-trading giant was still struggling to sort out its accounting. ADM in early November disclosed it found more errors in the way it reported transactions between its business units and that it would need to restate some of its results.

It canceled its quarterly earnings call with analysts only 14 hours before it was due to start, a move that sent shares plunging another 12%. The stock is down about 30% this year, heading for the biggest decline since the 2008 financial crisis.

“The market is reacting increasingly negatively to ADM,” Fuchs, who criticized himself for buying more of the company’s stock, said on LinkedIn on Sunday. “From a chart perspective, the share price has suffered significantly and there is obviously no effort on ADM’s part to stop or even reverse this trend.”

ADM has replaced its CFO, appointed AT&T Inc.’s top lawyer to its board and implemented new controls as part of efforts to restore credibility. It has corrected sales between units that either were previously recorded at prices that didn’t approximate the market, or included transactions that were improperly classified. So-called intersegment sales for 2023 had been previously overestimated by $1.28 billion.

This isn’t the first scandal involving ADM. Back in the 1990s, it was implicated in a price-fixing conspiracy that later became the basis of the 2009 film “The Informant!” starring Matt Damon. ADM pleaded guilty to the price-fixing charges in 1996. The company has also responded to a lawsuit over allegations of price manipulation involving its trading of ethanol. 

ADM has spent billions on its nutrition bet since 2014, when it made its biggest-ever acquisition — the $3 billion buyout of European natural ingredient maker Wild Flavors GmbH. It also spent about $1.8 billion to buy animal feed maker Neovia from France’s InVivo Group in 2019. But profits have failed to live up to initial expectations due to weakening demand, including for plant-based food.

“The ADM company, the people who work at ADM — and they are good people — they must be protected and these negative reports must be stopped,” said Fuchs. “The share price must rise again to levels that properly reflect the company’s true earning power (which, admittingly, would make me smile again).”