> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.businessbagel.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# Spar's board backed its chairman in May. On Monday he resigned.
- URL: https://www.businessbagel.com/spar-chairman-deputy-chair-resign/
- Published: 2026-08-18T03:30:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-18T03:29:59.000Z
- Description: Mike Bosman and deputy chair Shirley Zinn both left the Spar board on Monday, three months after the store owners asked for Bosman to go and were turned down.
- Author: Christian Maidman
- Tags: Companies, Business Bagel News

Spar's board spent May defending Mike Bosman. The independent retailers who own its stores had written to ask for him to go, and the board met specially, considered the request and put its full confidence in him on the record. On Monday morning he resigned anyway, effective the same day. Shirley Zinn resigned as deputy chair alongside him. The board says both still have its full support, and that each of them decided this for themselves. Its wording: "taking into consideration the context of the period that both these directors and the Board have recently experienced."

The pressure did not come from the share register. It came from the shops. Spar does not own the stores that carry its name: independent retailers do, and they buy their stock from Spar because it suits them to, an arrangement the group calls voluntary trading. That makes them customers rather than shareholders. It is a business built on store owners choosing you every week, which works beautifully right up until they stop.

Those retailers elect the Spar National Council to speak for them, and on 8 May the council wrote to the board asking it to get Bosman's resignation with immediate effect. It was careful about it. Nothing against the man personally, it said: he had come to stand for a bad few years, and for the gap that had opened between head office and the shop floor.

## Poland, Switzerland, and a computer system in KwaZulu-Natal

The list behind the letter is longer than the letter. Spar went into Poland and Switzerland, struggled in both and has now left both. Closer to home, it put a new computer system into its KwaZulu-Natal distribution centre and it worked so badly that retailers simply bought their stock elsewhere, which for a wholesaler is the one thing that cannot happen.

Bosman did not arrive to a clean desk. He took the chair in December 2022, weeks after the previous chairman and the chief executive left within a month of each other, then ran the company himself as executive chairman for most of 2023 because there was nobody else to do it. Zinn arrived in February 2023 and was deputy chair by June. She ran the pay committee, where she brought in rules letting Spar claw back executive bonuses after they had been paid, and pushed up the number of shares directors are expected to own.

## The chair Koyana is keeping warm

Lwazi Koyana, who chairs the risk committee, has the job in the meantime. The nominations committee is out looking for permanent directors and has been specific about what it wants at the top of the list: people who have actually run retail, and independent retail in particular. The board says it is fully behind chief executive Reeza Isaacs and finance chief Megan Pydigadu, and that neither the turnaround plan nor the forecasts have moved. The share was down 4.93% at R43.20 by late morning. Koyana holds the chair until somebody permanent turns up.