CFO Sold Company Stocks 3 Weeks Before Pet Food Recall

Chief Finaincial Officer of Menu Foods Sold Shares on Feb 26

According to Canadian trading reports, the chief financial officer of Menu Foods, Mark Wiens, sold 14,000 shares of company stock for a reported $89,900 (U.S. dollars) on February 26 and 27. The stock is now worth around $54,000 (U.S. dollars). The stock dump came three weeks before Menu Foods announced a massive recall of tainted pet food. "He feels just awful that this link has been made," company spokesman Sam Bornstein said. The shares sold represented 45% of Wiens' total holdings. After the sale, he still owned 17,193 units and options to purchase 101,812 units, according to insider trading reports.

Company officials said Menu Foods began getting calls about sick pets around Feb. 26, but Wiens would not have known about them because the company is too big. The calls didn't cause alarm at the upper levels of management until a week later. In another report by CBS News, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration first learned of the potential problem after receiving complaints on February 20th.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Bornstein said. "He is a highly principled guy and for the amount of money that we are talking about, for him to imperil his career, it just doesn't make any sense." "He's a leader of high standards in that company," he said. "That sort of thing would just be completely out of character."

Wiens called it a "horrible coincidence" in Tuesday's edition of the Globe and Mail. "I hold myself to the highest ethical and moral standards possible. I wouldn't do anything to imperil the high governance standards that I demand of myself or anybody in the company." "In terms of process, during any given year, we get consumer complaints all the time and it becomes matter of course for our technical people, so it's not something that necessarily gets flagged right to the top on an ongoing basis," Mr. Wiens said. Wiens sold his shares in late February for financial planning purposes. He was prohibited from trading until Feb. 16 because of a blackout period related to the company's fourth-quarter results, he said.