Interim Senior Vice President, Assurance — Renewal

Three honest options for every exposure

Every material exposure has three honest options: reduce it, pass it to someone better placed to carry it, or leave the activity that creates it. A fourth option, tolerating it without saying so, is the one assurance exists to prevent. The Interim Senior Vice President, Assurance will hold executive authority for twelve months, reporting to the Audit Committee Chair, to make sure every significant exposure in this agribusiness and food group has been placed deliberately into one of the three.

Why sponsor ownership sharpens the question

Private-equity owners tend to want exposure understood in value terms: what it costs to treat, what a transfer does to margin, what an exit does to the equity story. An assurance leader in this setting has to speak that language fluently without letting it override sound risk judgement, and has to be willing to tell a sponsor-appointed board that the cheapest route is not always the defensible one.

The authority in practice

You will lay out who decides what in assurance and what stays with local leaders, and select the measures by which investment, capacity and controls are judged across markets. Each inherited commitment will carry on, be paused or be stopped on your judgement; you will turn back proposals that slide cost or risk onto others with no accountable executive, and refuse investment that overlooks take-up, dependencies or downside. Approving how leaders are organised and how issues escalate is your call, and so is working through disputes between the Audit Committee Chair and the operators.

What the year should show

The first ninety days should rebuild the exposure register so that each material exposure has an owner and a proposed route, whether treatment, transfer or exit. Around month nine the audit committee should have decided the route for each priority exposure, with treatment actions tracked to closure. By month 12 renewed assurance coverage should confirm that transferred and exited exposures are genuinely closed, and the escalation arrangements should be in a state the next leader can take over without rebuilding.

Deal experience seen through an assurance lens

You have led assurance or risk in an organisation of $680 million or more in revenue, staffed by at least 2,000 people across four countries. Buy-side M&A and joint ventures are central here, since both create exposures that sit between parties and are easily orphaned; professionalisation is the third experience sought. The profile is risk judgement at level 4, with three level-3 capabilities beneath it: calibrating risk appetite, regulatory engagement and testing assurance. Your judgement should have been tested where operations could not stop while authority changed, and you should be able to describe funding you refused because take-up and downside were unnamed, and the capacity you rebuilt afterwards.

From the audit chair to the full board

It opens in week one with a private video conversation with the Audit Committee Chair. The Board Chair holds a working session with you in the third week. The fifth week brings executive leaders from each function together as an in-person panel, and the seventh week closes with the directors sitting as a full board. Two working days after each stage, the committee's view arrives in writing.