Last week CEO Vivek claimed most of his text messages were automatically deleted. Also and previously investigators were show messages going back and forth between players in this issue. Investigators asked those messages be kept. Apparently, those too have disappeared or portions of them have. It appears Albertsons has been milked by private entities Cerberus and Apollo who have been taking portions of equity out of Albertsons. In which case Kroger would be the white knight to the rescue. FTC questions Albertsons CEO on deleted text messages, Boise Dev PORTLAND, OR — Albertsons CEO Vivek Sankaran testified during a hearing in Portland about an unknown number of text messages he caused to be deleted. Sankaran was one of several
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Last week CEO Vivek claimed most of his text messages were automatically deleted. Also and previously investigators were show messages going back and forth between players in this issue. Investigators asked those messages be kept. Apparently, those too have disappeared or portions of them have.
It appears Albertsons has been milked by private entities Cerberus and Apollo who have been taking portions of equity out of Albertsons. In which case Kroger would be the white knight to the rescue.
FTC questions Albertsons CEO on deleted text messages, Boise Dev
PORTLAND, OR — Albertsons CEO Vivek Sankaran testified during a hearing in Portland about an unknown number of text messages he caused to be deleted.
Sankaran was one of several Albertsons executives who the Federal Trade Commission said appeared to not turn over all of their text messages, as BoiseDev reported last week.
On Wednesday, attorneys for the FTC and Albertsons questioned him about why the texts were deleted.
Sankaran said sometime in 2022, the same year Kroger and Albertsons began discussing the acquisition, he turned on the text message auto-delete feature on his phone.
Sankaran said he didn’t realize he had auto-delete on until questioning in a deposition in this case earlier this year. He said he never intentionally deleted texts about the acquisition.
Sankaran has one phone that he uses for both work and personal life. He said he sends about ten work-related texts per business day and testified that includes messages with Kroger CEO Rodney McMullen, C&S Wholesale Grocers Owner Richard B. Cohen, and members of the Albertsons leadership team.
The FTC asked Sankaran if he would be surprised that they only received 160 texts from him as part of discovery in its case to stop the acquisition of Albertsons by Kroger. Sankaran answered he was under the impression the agency got everything he had, and emphasized the steps he took to ensure things had been preserved after the FTC indicated it was investigating the deal.
The FTC’s attorney noted that using the most conservative estimates, Sankaran’s ten texts per day estimate meant it was missing at least 1,700 messages.
Sankaran claimed most of the texts were mundane, asking people to call him and responding to messages sent from his employees.
He said he turned off the auto-delete feature right after the deposition and hasn’t reenabled it since.