Photo: WBZ NewsRadio Archive
BOSTON (WBZ NewsRadio) — Ousted Market Basket CEO Arthur T. Demoulas filed a counterclaim Wednesday, looking to get his job back, after the grocery store chain's board fired and sued him last month.
A spokesperson for Demoulas said the board broke Market Basket's bylaws by firing him before "he had the opportunity to defend himself," and that the lawsuit filed against Demoulas was an attempt "to justify their action as proper and ask the courts to bless it."
In the countersuit, lawyers for Demoulas said the board was "beholden" to his three sisters, who together own 60% of the company behind Market Basket, to help them in the family's pending trust litigation.
"If [Demoulas] did not respond to this filing, the court would have to issue a default judgment in the board's favor," the spokesperson said. "He is not seeking monetary damages but for the court to find that the board's actions were unlawful and to reinstate him."
In a statement, Market Basket's board said the accusations are not true, and that Demoulas was fired because he did not cooperate with the board by withholding information like "forward-looking budgets and information about large, planned capital expenditures."
" A CEO cannot stay at the helm of a company if he refuses to be accountable to the Board. And that was and continues to be Mr. Demoulas’s failing," the statement read. "Mr. Demoulas wouldn’t even allow the Board into the Market Basket headquarters or to meet his senior staff. Whether to be accountable rather than autocratic has always been within Mr. Demoulas’s sole control. But he repeatedly refused, even up to the point of his termination."