This story was picked up by the International Herald Tribune, the U.K. Daily Telegraph, France's La Tribune, Le Point and Le Monde -- the only newspaper to actually manage to get Carrefour to react, too.
By Lionel Laurent
PARIS, March 25 (Reuters) - Carrefour (CARR.PA), the world's No. 2 retailer, is facing embarrassing questions over the appointment of a senior executive whose previous employer disputes that he held the top role claimed in his profile.
When Paris-based Carrefour hired Jose Carlos Gonzalez-Hurtado away from Procter & Gamble (PG.N) to take the newly created post of chief commercial officer in Nov. 2009, the food retailer heralded his recent promotion to worldwide head of P&G's male grooming unit Braun.
"In 2006, he was appointed Vice President of Global Braun Male Products, and in 2008, he was put in charge of Braun globally," the press release said in November 2009, language that is echoed in the profile of the Spaniard -- now a member of Carrefour's board - on the retailer's website.
But according both to Braun itself and to the P&G unit's former head, Gonzalez-Hurtado's promotion from vice president to president of the unit is a fiction.
"That is not accurate," Braun spokesman Lars Atorf said, stating that Hurtado had never been president at the P&G unit, best known for its electric razors. "When you are in the role of vice-president you are number two, you are leading the brand-building."
Procter & Gamble's annual reports for 2008 and 2009 cite Juan Pedro Hernandez as the president of Braun. Reached by Reuters, Hernandez said: "I was the only president of Braun."
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