Market Basket CEO Arthur T. Demoulas was fired by the company’s board of directors Tuesday, months after he was placed on leave and less than a week after the two sides attempted mediation.
In a court filing supporting his termination, the company’s board argued that Demoulas’s “autocratic” leadership style forced their decision.
“He cared more about getting his own way than about the company and its constituents’ best interests and future—just the opposite of the carefully cultivated public persona that Mr. Demoulas portrays to the outside world,” the filing reads.
Demoulas has been at the company’s helm for decades and is widely revered by many of the 30,000 employees across Market Basket’s 90 locations. He has described his suspension from the Tewksbury, Mass.-based retail grocer, as well as the termination of company executives in his corner, as a “coup.”
A spokesperson for Demoulas said Wednesday that mediation failed because the board never had any interest in reinstating him, and that the board’s claims about his leadership were false.
“The so-called investigation was designed from the start to falsely tarnish the reputation of Mr. Demoulas and his leadership team,” Justine Griffin, the spokesperson, said in a statement. Demoulas’ three sisters and the board members appointed by them “took a company that was operating at peak performance and recklessly threw it into turmoil and did so in a needlessly public manner and on baseless grounds fabricated from the start.”
While tensions erupted publicly when Demoulas was placed on leave in May, court filings describe years of escalating tensions between him, his sisters and the board of directors.
From the view of the board, which did not include any members of the Demoulas family, Demoulas had long demanded and received their complete deference.
Demoulas’s three sisters joined him in 2014 to buy out their cousins and end the then-ongoing dispute over his leadership. Five years later, when his sisters decided to “professionalize” the board by appointing members who would perform more oversight, Demoulas resisted.
The board claims he refused to provide them with annual budgets for the company, did not notify or include them in decisions about major construction projects and stiff-armed them from the grocery chain’s daily operations, preventing them from meeting other company staff or entering company headquarters.
He also asserted that his children would succeed him in the company’s C-suite positions but prevented the board from interacting with his children or evaluating them as potential candidates.
After years of his resistance, the board said it issued Demoulas an ultimatum in August 2024, requiring that he share with them basic financial information, let them engage with business operations and work with them on developing a succession plan. Board members also demanded he not participate in 10th anniversary celebrations of the 2014 walkout that led to his reinstatement.
Demoulas didn’t comply with these asks, the court filing states, and when confronted about this defiance in January 2025, he “dared board members to fire him… apparently banking on an employee walkout and customer boycott like the one that followed his temporary ouster in 2014.”
With the writing on the wall, the board learned this spring that Demoulas was organizing behind the scenes to drum up a walkout, according to the filing. That led to his suspension in May.
In the months since, the board accused Demoulas of orchestrating a “scorched-earth” media campaign, portraying its members as motivated solely by corporate greed and uninterested in the company’s culture and history, even as he had spent years boxing them out of it.
In their view, the company “cannot flourish over the long-term under the leadership of a dictator,” and the three remaining members of the board voted unanimously on Tuesday to terminate Demoulas.
In 2014, when the company was reorganized, Demoulas agreed to a rule that the board could fire company officers at will, the court filing notes.
Griffin, Demoulas’ spokesperson, said that the termination late Tuesday night denied the CEO a chance to be heard, as the company’s bylaws require.
“Throughout this ordeal, Mr. Demoulas has remained committed to his single goal – to return to Market Basket to work alongside the 32,000 Associates,” Griffin said. “Mr. Demoulas’ passion for the company and his care for the associates remains unchanged.”
Demoulas’ reputation as a leader who places the family business, te wellbeing of his employees and the wallets of his shoppers first has often been regarded as Market Basket’s foundation. It’s what drove the months-long 2014 customer boycott and employee walkouts.
What happens next will put that reputation to the test.
“Mr. Demoulas and his allies have suggested that Market Basket could not possibly function without him and his lieutenants at the helm,” the directors wrote in their filing. Since his suspension, they continued, “Market Basket’s same store sales have increased.”