Unilever powerbase swings to UK

FOOD and household goods giant Unilever will bow to pressure this week to shake up its corporate structure with the most radical reshaping of top management of the group since its creation 75 years ago.

The company's tradition of having two chairmen, a legacy of the merger in 1930 of Britain's Lever Brothers and Dutch margarine company Van Den Bergh, is to be abandoned.

Insiders predict that overall control of Unilever, now split between Rotterdam and London, will shift towards Britain, despite fierce resistance from the Dutch.

Unilever is currently under joint chairmen Patrick Cescau and Antony Burgmans. That arrangement will be scrapped with Cescau expected to become chief executive and Burgmans made chairman.

Burgmans' chairmanship is expected to be an executive role, but Unilever will signal that in the medium-term, the position will be non-executive.

'Patrick Cescau is definitely up for change,' said a figure with intimate knowledge of the company. Burgmans is thought to be less enthusiastic and is determined for now to retain an executive role, despite the unease of some major shareholders.

The changes will be unveiled when Unilever, whose huge product range includes Flora margarine, Hellman's mayonnaise, Persil washing powder and Dove soap, announces its 2004 results on Thursday. They are expected to show a small drop in underlying profits to about £3.9bn.

The headline figure will be severely dented by one-off costs. These are likely to include a write-down of hundreds of millions of pounds in the value of Slim-Fast, the biggest diet food brand in the US. Slim-Fast's sales were slashed by the popularity of the Atkins diet because the brand lacked low carbohydrate products favoured by Atkins' followers.

The first signs of pressure on Unilever to simplify its management structure came after the company admitted last September that it was likely to miss self-imposed sales targets, set down as part of the company's Path To Growth strategy first spelled out in 1999.

Then, as revealed by Financial Mail on Sunday, Cescau asked the Unilever board if it should consider a similar move to the decision by oil giant Shell - also Anglo-Dutch - to combine its two arms.