Leet of 12 announced for ANM Group vote

This follows a stormy annual meeting in April which saw calls for the chairman, John McIntosh, to resign in the light of losses amounting to almost £4 million chalked up by the co-op’s meat division in the year to December 2011.

Former chief executive Alan Craig left the company abruptly in January and was succeeded in February by accountant Patrick Machray, a board member for two years, who launched a review of the meat division’s activities.

Craig had closed a boning plant in Sheffield with the loss of 57 jobs and that was followed by the sale of a processing business in Glasgow, Charcuterie Continental, to meat wholesaler AP Jess.

The group has now put its entire meat division, comprising Scotch Premier Meat in Inverurie and Yorkshire Premier Meat at South Kirby in Yorkshire, up for sale. The group’s auction division, Aberdeen & Northern Marts, made a trading profit of £1.677 million last year but a £1m write-down of an ill-fated golf course development near Elgin pushed the group’s pre-tax loss up to £4.066m.

However, the balance sheet is strong, with assets of £19.293m as at 31 December and a seven-figure revaluation of properties since then.

Machray has been the driving force behind the move to introduce a more democratic system for the election of board members and give the wider membership of 6,000 a bigger say in how the company is run.

Prospective board members to fill the two vacancies have been fully briefed on the duties and responsibilities of directors and will be given five minutes each to present their credentials to members at the EGM .

The 12 candidates include two of the board’s fiercest critics, Colin Clark and Raymond Davidson – a former board member – who were calling at the last AGM for the chairman to resign.

Others include former NFU Scotland vice-president Peter Chapman and former Food Standards Agency board member Mike Gibson.