Consumerist has an interesting bit on Menu Foods, the company that processes the food involved in the recent recall.

The chief financial officer of Menu Foods sold about half his shares in the company just three weeks before a massive recall of its pet food products, Canadian insider trading reports show.

CFO Mark Wiens sold 14,000 shares for $89,900 on Feb. 26 and Feb. 27. The shares are now worth about $54,000.

“He feels just awful that this link has been made,” company spokesman Sam Bornstein said Wednesday.

Awful to the point of kidney failure?

Doubtful…

Menu Foods began getting calls about sick cats around Feb. 26, but Bornstein said Wiens would not have known about them due to the size of the company. The calls didn’t cause alarm until a week later.

“He is a highly principled guy and for the amount of money that we are talking about, for him to imperil his career, it just doesn’t make any sense,” Bornstein said.

“He’s a leader of high standards in that company,” he said. “That sort of thing would just be completely out of character.”

Wiens called it a “horrible coincidence” in Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper. He did not immediately return phone calls Wednesday and Bornstein said Wiens didn’t want to talk about his shares any more.

Talk about despicable. Is there anyone who actually believes he just happened to sell off half of his shares in the company he’s a Chief Financial Officer of with no prior knowledge of the impending problems they were facing from the products they already had out on the market?

Horrible coincidence my ass.

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