One of the world’s largest apparel makers has been roiled by fresh dirt coming to the surface during a CEO shuffle — muddying a succession battle forged by activist investors who want the corporate to bring back the ousted boss, The Post has learned.
Gildan Activewear, a Montreal-based T-shirt wholesaler with a roughly $6 billion market cap, pushed out co-founder Glenn Chamandy last December and tapped veteran executive Vince Tyra to switch him.
Nonetheless, Tyra allegedly had an affair greater than 20 years ago with an worker who reported on to him at one other company — and who now holds a senior leadership position at Gildan, in line with a report by a research firm that The Post reviewed in redacted form.
Now, California-based hedge fund Browning West and other sizable shareholders, which had pushed to remove five directors after Chamandy’s ouster in December before the report in regards to the alleged affair, claim Gildan’s board didn’t do its due diligence before hiring Tyra – and his reunion with a possible former paramour may create potential legal headaches down the road, sources said.
“If a CEO behaves like this again we’ll get MeTooed. That is just not good for us,” a Gildan shareholder with a big stake in the corporate told The Post.
The alleged affair was unearthed by Paragon Intel, which sells annual subscriptions for its 100 or so yearly reports for as much as $75,000 to investment firms.
The 33-page initial background research report claimed that in Tyra’s time as CEO of Gildan distributor Broder Bros. from 2000-2005, he had a tryst with the underling, which the report names but The Post has decided to not discover after reviewing the document.
The report now making the rounds is just of raw interviews and Paragon plans to release a final version inside weeks where it’ll express its opinion on whether Tyra must be replaced, Chamandy must be brought back or if neither should run the business.
A source near Gildan railed over the mud-slinging by the disgruntled activist investors, which the person claimed is motivated to influence a vote by shareholders at the corporate’s annual meeting slated for May 28.
“This false story is a reprehensible attack by Browning West, Glenn Chamandy, and their cronies to harm two good people in an try and win a proxy contest. There was no affair. Mr. Tyra dated a colleague for lower than three months, 22 years ago. On the time, he was separated, and he or she was divorced. The activists pushing this story have reached a new low,” the source said.
“The shareholders and director nominees who’ve followed Browning West’s try and hijack Gildan and its Board should query how they will associate with activists who peddle this type of disgusting character assassination. Browning West’s own investors must be ashamed by this behavior.”
Browning West and Chamandy declined comment.
The source near Gildan told The Post the 58-year-old Tyra, who’s married and has five children, was separated on the time of the alleged affair. The source said the subordinate was divorced when the 2 connected.
The insider went on to indicate that there could be two layers of management between Tyra and his former lover — and that there isn’t a policy precluding the corporate from hiring someone because they’d a consensual relationship with a current Gildan worker greater than 20 years ago.
Nevertheless, a company governance expert said their relationship is fair to lift as a difficulty as part of a broader have a look at whether Tyra must have been hired — however the incontrovertible fact that it allegedly happened greater than 20 years ago “makes it more of a gray area.”
“The passage of time makes a difference and it is just not so black and white,” Doug Chia, president of Soundboard Governance, told The Post.
“In today’s day and age, you have got to take into consideration a history of inappropriate relationships. People will look back and hold him to today’s standards.”
“One would hope the board knew about it and thought of it,” added Chia, who is just not involved within the Gildan battle.
Tyra and Gildan’s board, led by Donald Berg, didn’t comment.
Chamandy, who has known Tyra for 3 many years, co-founded the corporate with his brother in 1984 and had been the only real CEO since 2004.
The Gildan board had said it desired to move on from Chamandy because he was trying to make large acquisitions that will have hurt the corporate. It also wanted a bigger role in selecting his successor.
Chamandy acted like Gildan was his business and didn’t respect his directors, one of Gildan’s leading shareholders told The Post.
“This become an ego thing,” the source said.
Chamandy referred The Post to a press release he made on Jan. 9.
“I’m deeply upset by the actions of the Gildan board of directors,” he said on the time. “Having been on the helm of Gildan for greater than 20 years, I take great offense at what appears to be a premeditated effort to publicly undermine my record and, what’s even worse from a company standpoint, is that their careless behavior can be tarnishing the fame of an important company.”
“The board’s self-serving motives, designed to distract from its own recklessness, have led them to lose sight of what is actually vital — the perfect interests of the Company, along with its employees, customers and shareholders.”
A Gildan analyst said the board was well inside its rights to oust Chamandy because the corporate has underperformed the last couple of years.
“I don’t think Chamandy’s track record justified this type of response to get him back in place,” said the analyst, who requested anonymity to talk freely in regards to the company.
“But I believe the investors felt blindsided by the announcement. It was very abrupt. There’s a natural connection between many of them with Glenn, and the board completely mishandled the communications in regards to the change.”
Gildan posted revenue of $3.2 billion last 12 months, down 1.4% from 2022, in line with the corporate’s earnings report last month. Net income was $533.6 million, down 1.5% from 2022.
Tyra apparently doesn’t have significant plans to change Charmandy’s growth strategy, in line with an analyst report attached to Gildan’s Feb. 21 earnings report.
“New CEO Vince Tyra is just a month into his tenure and hinted at an updated technique to be communicated in the approaching months, likely at an investor day,” the report said.
“Nonetheless, he did make clear that he’s looking to reinforce and never alter [Chamandy’s] Sustainable Growth Strategy, and that neither a step-up in marketing spend nor M&A were within the plans. We imagine this brings a sigh of relief for the market, which had been increasingly supportive of the pillars of the Back To Basics platform.”
Berg, meanwhile, has been unmoved by any claims of impropriety involving Tyra, telling investors the Paragon report was commissioned by one of its activist shareholders, sources told The Post.
Paragon denied Berg’s claim.
“Nobody paid us to do the report. We identified this case because there was an external CEO change,” Paragon CEO Ty Popplewell said. “We’re not an opposition research firm.”
Paragon spoke to several former Broder executives who claimed to have knowledge of Tyra’s relationship with the present Gildan exec.
“He began dating this woman within the office. It was like, WTF? He was the CEO, so we went along with it. What are you going to do?” one ex-Broder exec said within the heavily redacted version of the report reviewed by The Post.
One other said: “I had never been around people with that lack of ethics and morals.”
Other than the office romance, the activist shareholders have also questioned Tyra’s business acumen. He was president of Fruit of the Loom when it declared bankruptcy in 1999 before jumping ship to Broder Bros.
Bain Capital, which owned Broder, pushed out Tyra in 2005 because of poor financial performance, a Broder source told The Post.
Tyra later left the company world to turn into the athletic director at Louisville University in 2017.
That very same 12 months the university’s board fired legendary coach Rick Pitino over a pay-to-play recruiting scandal.
Pitino, who had coached the Knicks and won NCAA titles at Kentucky and Louisville, moved on to Iona before taking on at St. John’s last fall.
Tyra, a Louisville native, left the university in 2021. He was hired the next 12 months as senior vp for corporate strategy, mergers and acquisitions at Kentucky-based Houchens Industries before getting hired by Gildan.