EDITORIAL: What’s behind Griffith’s shock exit?

It is hard not to suspect that there is more to Chris Griffith’s surprise resignation as CEO of Gold Fields. 

Griffith was the force behind Gold Fields’s $6bn bid to buy Canadian company Yamana Gold, which failed last month. But there was no sense that this would lead to him quitting a role he took on only in April 2021.

On Tuesday, Gold Fields chair Yunus Suleman said Griffith felt he “should take responsibility and allow the company to move forward under new leadership unencumbered by the Yamana transaction”.

Yet no shareholders have called for his resignation, seeing this more as a bold gambit that, by circumstance, went south. If anything, Griffith displayed admirable restraint in not entering into a bidding war. 

This move is all the more mystifying because Griffith said last month that if the Yamana bid tanked, “we don’t have to jump off the balcony”, as there were “other options”.

Griffith’s exit also throws the spotlight on the number of empty executive offices. Gold Fields’s top compliance executive, its head of strategy and head of corporate affairs all resigned in October.