Tesco rushed its new chief financial officer into place today, as it tries to shore up a leadership team badly damaged by the accounting mistake revealed yesterday that knocked millions off the company's profits and billions from its share price.
Tesco hired Alan Stewart from Marks & Spencer early in the summer but he was not due to start until December.
Tesco's - also new - chief executive Dave Lewis said today that M&S boss Marc Bolland had now agreed to release Stewart early.
The 54-year-old must now set about restoring the credibility of Tesco's finances after this week's revelation that the firm's first half profit forecast had been overstated by £250m.
That news - effectively Tesco's third profit warning in two months - along with the suspension of four senior executives and the company's decision to call in investigators wiped £2 billion off Tesco's stock market value.
Its shares added another 4.2% drop to yesterday's 12% drop after UK industry sales data today showed no signs of recovery in its key UK market.
Stewart is expected to immediately start preparing Tesco's interim results, the date of which was pushed back from October 1 to October 23. Analysts are bracing for further write-offs and negative news on that date.
The company's new adviser Deloitte and legal adviser Freshfields, brought in by Lewis to investigate the profit overstatement, could well find other issues or the same issues in other countries, analysts have said.
Investors are also waiting to see how much it will cost Lewis to fix the company's struggling UK operations, which are losing market share to fast growing German discounters Aldi and Lidl in a grocery market that is growing at its slowest pace for over 20 years.
The latest industry data showed the magnitude of that task. Kantar Worldpanel said Tesco's UK sales in the 12 weeks to September 14 fell 4.5% year-on-year, taking its share of the UK grocery market down to 28.8% from 30.2% this time last year.
Tesco remains the worst performer of Britain's so called "big four" grocers, which also includes Wal-Mart's Asda, Sainsbury's and Morrisons.
Tesco has effectively been without a chief financial officer since Laurie McIlwee quit the role in April. Though McIlwee's official leaving date was October 3 he had been working only sporadically since handing in his resignation.
Stewart quit M&S on July 10 to join Tesco but had since been on a period of so called "gardening leave", his contractual notice period which meant he could not join Tesco until December 1.
A spokesman for M&S said today that Stewart had been released early after "a request from Dave to Marc. As a business that operates with integrity we felt it was the right thing to do."
Tesco did not pay any compensation for Stewart's early release, the spokesman added. Stewart is vastly experienced and has a reputation for cost cutting.
He had held the CFO role at M&S since October 2010 and before that was finance director of WH Smith. He has also held executive roles at HSBC and Thomas Cook.
Separately it emerged today that executives at Tesco's Homeplus business in South Korea, its largest overseas unit, are being investigated over the possible leaking of customers' personal information.
