American Media Inc., a company with a habit of missing [1] financial [2] filings [3], has replaced its chief financial officer, possibly in advance of a long-rumored sale [4].
Dean Durbin, a former CEO at Vertis Communications and a b-to-b publishing veteran of Thomson and McGraw-Hill, has been named executive vice president and chief financial officer, replacing Jack Craven, who resigned this week. Durbin becomes AMI’s sixth CFO in four years. Craven will now serve as a consultant to AMI, according to the company.
Durbin’s experience in M&A seems to have been a key reason he was hired.
"Dean has wide-ranging experience in financial reporting and analysis, strategic planning, forecasting, Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, mergers, acquisitions and divestitures, and I expect that he will be an excellent addition to our senior management team and a contributor to our continued success," said AMI Chairman and CEO David Pecker in a statement accompanying Durbin’s hiring announcement.
“In Dean Durbin, we have an executive whose financial knowledge and insight will be as important to the company going forward as Jack's talents were in getting us to where we are today,” added Richard Bressler, managing director at Thomas H. Lee Partners, who, along with Evercore Capital Partners, are AMI’s principal shareholders., "I can't thank Jack enough for the tremendous job he did at AMI. Thomas H. Lee Partners, together with Evercore Capital Partners, are the principal shareholders in AMI.
It has been widely reported that AMI is coveted by Source Interlink [5], the company controlled by supermarket billionaire Ron Burkle’s Yucaipa Cos.—and that the deal has thus far been hampered by AMI’s financial reporting deficiencies.
Pecker thanked Craven for “[guiding] us through the restatement process and [bringing] our required filings up to date."
In May, Source Interlink bought Primedia’s enthusiast titles for $1.2 billion [6].
According to Pecker, AMI's financial performance in its current fiscal year is its “strongest in recent years,” with Shape, Men's Fitness and Star generating the “largest advertising revenue in their respective histories.” The company has also generated significant improvements in bank EBITDA, Pecker says.