The financial crunch that Penthouse has been under all year reached a head when last week Penthouse founder Bob Guccione stepped down as chairman and CEO of Penthouse International, and was replaced by Milton R. Polland, a 90-year-old man with a diverse professional background that includes both politics and insurance.
Guccione will retain his position as chairman and CEO of General Media Inc, the subsidiary of Penthouse International, Inc. that publishes Penthouse.
Guccione will also keep his positions as editor-in-chief and publisher of the magazine.
Charles Samel, the executive vice president of Penthouse International, Inc. also resigned last week. Samel was the primary financial advisor for the publishing empire. Neither Guccione or Samel issued any comments regarding their resignations.
The move comes just three months after General Media, Inc. declared bankruptcy in an attempt to reorganize their debt load.
Polland says that his new positions were offered to him, and declined having any knowledge of why Guccione or Samel resigned.
Samel and Polland both served the board of the Emergent Group, a company with an unknown mission that appears to no longer exist.
Polland currently serves as the chairman of the board for Genutec, and has corporate governance experience with a number of delisted companies.
According to their corporate Website, Genutec is a business-to-business technology provider that appears to be geared towards real estate companies.
Polland co-managed the campaign for Thomas Dewey and Earl Warren when they ran as Republican nominees for President and Vice President respectively in 1948.
Guccione's resignation came just after the completion of a stock for land swap that secured a $107 million oceanfront property in Mexico. Penthouse entered into the deal with Arizona-based Del Sol Investments LLC. Del Sol, in return, received 11.5 million shares of Penthouse International stock, as well as 30 million shares of restricted common stock.
Del Sol is controlled by Dr. L. Enrique Fernando Molina. The Molina family was also the anchor licensee of PepsiCo for Mexico, under which they controlled Pepsi-Gemex, the largest independent Pepsi bottler outside the United States
In August, General Media filed for Chapter 11 in New York after circulation for Penthouse tumbled from nearly 1 million in 1998 to 565,700 last year.
Failure to diversify their assets, particularly a failure to adapt to the New Media age, is commonly cited as the cause of the decline of Penthouse International, Inc, whose flagship magazine once rivaled Playboy and Hustler.
