Rose to sever ties with ACCA.
The desperate search for a new chief executive at ACCA continues to draw a blank as Anthea Rose says she will play no part in the institute's future.
ACCA chief executive Anthea Rose has reiterated her determination to retire next week and insisted she will not continue with the association in any capacity.
After a hugely embarrassing week when chief executive designate Desmond Hudson resigned just days before he was due to start, Rose was determined to quash rumours that Hudson’s departure was down to her unwillingness to let go of the reigns.
‘I’m not here after 30 September, so I’m out of it,’ Rose told Accountancy Age. ‘I am not involved at all. I am retiring, full stop.’
Hudson’s sudden departure makes him the second CEO that ACCA has lost just before they were due to start.
Sources close to ACCA maintain that Hudson’s resignation was connected with the role Rose would play in the future but Rose was adamant. ‘I don’t know where you’ve got that, because it isn’t true.’
Hudson’s departure comes at the worst possible time for ACCA because it is about to embark on its centenary year.
Interim chief executive Helen Brand chief operating officer at ACCA, will no doubt see in the start of the celebrations on 1 December.
How soon a permanent successor for Rose can be found is open to debate.
Two years and two resignations into the search, it seems no one wants what Andrew Hind, the other former chief executive designate, and now chief operating officer at the BBC World Service, described this week as an ‘outstandingly attractive job’.
What is clear is that Rose will take no part in the search for her successor, after she ruled it out last week adding that she has not ‘been involved in finding the previous two successors’.
And it is extremely unlikely the headhunter that found both Hind and Hudson, Whitehead Mann, will start another search.
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‘To be honest it is unlikely that we’ll be using them again. They have been doing it for the last two years,’ a spokesman for ACCA said.
Hind’s revelation that he resigned from the position due to a ‘change in the terms of reference to the job to do with the remit of the chief executive role’ will be a bitter pill for ACCA members to swallow.
His resignation in the autumn of 2001 was bad enough, but Hudson almost mirroring what Hind did indicates some serious problems at the heart of the association. Ultimately, it is members that will have to pay for the seemingly never-ending search for a chief executive.
In March this year ACCA announced in a letter, from the then president Jonathan Beckerlegge, that subscriptions would be increased by 3.2% to £160 for 2004. How much of that will be swallowed up in the search for a chief executive is not clear.
Anthea Rose will leave behind a job which paid her £191,896 in 2002 as well as a £62,000 bonus. She will, however, collect an annual pension which was worth £136,625 when the association’s last accounts were drawn up earlier this year.