Three months ago, ousted Kohl’s CEO Ashley Buchanan posted a video on LinkedIn of the glamorous retail guru with whom he disastrously mixed business and romance — a social-media goof that may have helped spark his getting fired this week, The Post has learned.
The 51-year-old Buchanan – reportedly axed on Thursday over a “highly unusual multimillion-dollar contract” that involved his 44-year-old lover, Chandra Holt – reposted on LinkedIn a video produced by Holt to promote her five month-old coffee startup, IncrediBrew.
The video shows a coiffed Holt in a white turtleneck, sitting in front of an electric fireplace while extolling the benefits of collagen infused coffee.
“For those of you over the age of 30 and have not discovered collagen, I would highly recommend it. It is amazing for hair, skin and nails as well as bone and joint health,” Holt says in the video.
The fact that Buchanan had not taken down the post on Thursday afternoon — hours after the scandal broke — shocked some industry insiders.
“Can’t believe he still has her on his LinkedIn page,” one retail executive told The Post.
One LinkedIn user likewise commented on Buchanan’s post, writing, “Dayum bro Ashley Buchanan no wonder you got exposed, you repos[t]ing this.”
Buchanan appeared to have taken down his LinkedIn profile altogether on Friday. Kohl’s, meanwhile, disclosed it had fired Buchanan for cause on Thursday morning — but didn’t remove his profile from its website until late afternoon.
“Ordinarily if you fire someone you don’t have a glowing bio of our CEO at 3 p.m.,” said Mitchell Epner, a former federal prosecutor who now specializes in employment law and white collar crime for Kudman Trachten Aloe Posner LLP.
“It’s evidence that Kohl’s was moving very quickly,” Epner said. “If they had time to implement this, someone would have gone through and removed him from the website.”
Epner said he couldn’t speculate on what tipped off Kohl’s except to say that companies have a number of ways that they track information that could lead to investigations, including anonymous tip lines and internal controls.
Holt, meanwhile, also got fired the same day from her plum gig at Boston Consulting Group, which had been hired for the multimillion-dollar Kohl’s contract, the prestigious firm confirmed in a statement to The Post.
“BCG was shocked to learn of the relationship between Chandra Holt and Ashley Buchanan. We have strict guidelines for our senior advisors to disclose any conflicts of interest,” the company said in a statement.
“As a result of this non-disclosure, we have terminated Chandra Holt’s contract.”
Kohl’s has not commented or confirmed that BCG or Holt sparked Buchanan’s firing.
Buchanan and Holt did not return calls for comment.
It turns out that there’s plenty that Holt and Buchanan failed to disclose to their former employers.
The pair, who both hail from Texas and worked together for years at Walmart, are living together in an upscale golf community in Dallas, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
After Buchanan left Walmart in 2020 to head up the Michaels arts-and-crafts chain, he tried to hire Holt, according to the report. Holt left Walmart instead to become CEO of Conn’s HomePlus – a stint that lasted a year. The chain went belly up last year.
Holt told The Journal that she and Buchanan were not in a relationship when she was being recruited by Michael’s. But Buchanan’s divorce proceedings suggest otherwise, according to the report.
“Mr. Buchanan was recruiting Chandra Holt to be part of Michaels’ executive team,” his ex-wife’s lawyer wrote, according to the report. “Ms. Holt is not simply a paramour, but instead is someone who very likely was privy to communications relevant to this case.”
This time, Buchanan could be facing more serious legal trouble, according to a white collar attorney.
“It is highly unusual for a company to say that it is firing an executive for cause,” Epner said.
The lawyer said Buchanan potentially violated the Sarbanes-Oxley Act by not disclosing what’s called “related party” conflicts of interest before he signed Kohl’s annual report on March 20.
“Depending on the specifics of the relationship with the person who he entered into these contracts and the timing, it’s possible that those contracts had to be disclosed,” Epner said.
BCG said in a statement that as an advisor to BCG Holt “is a recognized industry expert we would use part time and pay hourly to provide advice on specific topics. She was not involved in structuring the [Kohl’s] project or negotiating any contract terms and was not expected to lead any part of the project.”
But Holt, who was retained by BCG about 10 months ago, would have been called on as an expert during the course of the project, a source with knowledge of the deal told The Post.
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