Charter sidelines COO Barford
NEW YORK (Dow Jones/AP) – Charter Communications Inc., the country’s fourth-largest cable company, Tuesday said it placed Chief Operating Officer David G. Barford on paid leave. St. Louis-based Charter said President and Chief Executive Carl Vogel has assumed Barford’s duties on an interim basis. It did not explain the reason for Barford’s leave. Aryeh B. Bourkoff, an analyst at UBS Warburg LLC, said Charter’s chief financial officer, Kent Kalkwarf, Tuesday told him that Vogel decided to sideline Barford because of poor performance at the company and its “recent subscriber and bad debt trends.”
Bourkoff said he doesn’t expect Barford to return to Charter and he sees the paid leave as essentially “part of a severance package.”
Bourkoff said he owns a small amount of Charter stock. His firm doesn’t have an investment banking relationship with the company.
The cable company, which is controlled by Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft Corp., has been plagued with problems recently. In August, a federal grand jury subpoenaed Charter in a criminal probe focusing on its accounting for capital expenses and costs of disconnecting customers. On Oct. 2, it said subscriber losses would hurt profits in the third quarter.
Charter has blamed the loss of analog subscribers partially on competition from satellite-television services that charge less for digital programming. Charter is especially vulnerable to satellite competition because many of its subscribers live in rural areas.