Spar chair Mike Bosman shares inside story of shock CEO departure

Spar Group CEO Angelo Swartz was ‘by far the best candidate’ when he moved into the role in 2023 and remains ‘highly respected’. Image: Suren Naidoo/ Moneyweb Spar Group chair Mike Bosman has shared additional details and context around the “sudden’ departure of CEO Angelo Swartz at the end of February. Speaking at the group’s AGM on Wednesday, Bosman admitted that while the group has had three CEOs in the past three years, the reality of these leadership changes is a little more nuanced.

Bosman revealed to shareholders that Swartz asked to see him in Cape Town in early January and at this meeting he explained that “he was feeling very uncomfortable and he’d had a break but wasn’t feeling refreshed”. “He felt that the pressures on him were enormous” and since the year-end results released towards the end of 2025 “he’d really taken a battering personally”. “He has a young daughter who’s six years old; he’s a single dad.

He felt that he’d given everything to the business, and he felt that the pace of the change in the business needed to be accelerated.” Bosman said Swartz was also “obviously very concerned that the share price had deteriorated so significantly”. Across 2025, the share price of the wholesaler and retailer had declined 35%. The chair told investors that Swartz was also “very disappointed” about its trading performance in the peak November and Black Friday period – “and to a certain extent I think he took that personally, which was probably unnecessary”. Spar reported like-for-like retail sales growth of 2.25% in South Africa for the 18 weeks to the end of January (effectively October to January) which, while the strongest in recent years, did come at a cost.