Co-op poaches new chief executive from Kingfisher The Co-operative Group has appointed Euan Sutherland, a retail and consumer goods specialist with no financial services background, to succeed Peter Marks as its chief executive when he retires next year after overseeing a period of rapid expansion, most recently in banking. The mutually owned conglomerate, which spans food retailing, banking, insurance, funeral homes and travel agencies, said Mr Sutherland, currently chief operating officer of home improvement retailer Kingfisher, had "considerable experience of the strategic leadership needed in complex customer-facing businesses." The 43-year-old is already a non-executive director of the Co-op's supermarket arm and used to chair Kingfisher's B&Q chain, having joined the FTSE 100 group in 2008. He will leave Kingfisher in March and formally take on the chief executive role at the Co-op in May. Prior to Kingfisher, Mr Sutherland's career had been in retailing and consumer goods, with spells at Boots, Mars, Coca-Cola, Dixons Retail, Matalan and AS Watson, the owner of the Superdrug chain. Freddie George, an analyst at Seymour Pierce, said Mr Sutherland had been viewed as a "credible successor" to Ian Cheshire, Kingfisher chief executive: "He was, in our view, a major contributory factor in the recovery of [Kingfisher's] UK business over the past five years." The Co-op had sales of £12.3bn in 2011. Profit before tax and member payments - the equivalent of pre-tax profit for a quoted company - was £373m. More than half of the group's underlying operating profit came from food retailing but the importance of financial services to the business is set to increase after it agreed a provisional deal earlier this year to purchase 632 retail bank branches from Lloyds Banking Group. The Co-op's enlarged banking arm will be a strong challenger to the dominance of the UK's biggest banks and is due to be led by Paul Pester, currently in charge of the Lloyds branches included in the deal. Mr Marks, who has led the Co-op since 2007, will be 63 when he retires. When his forthcoming departure was announced in August, he said a new CEO was needed to see through the planned three to five year integration of the Lloyds branches. Under Mr Marks" leadership, the group also purchased the Somerfield supermarket chain and merged its banking arm with the Britannia building society.