Australia’s Nine Entertainment CFO to step down after fiscal year results

(Reuters) – Nine Entertainment said on Wednesday Chief Financial Officer Greg Barnes would leave the company shortly after it reports fiscal 2019 results at the end of August.

Nine gave no reason for Barnes’s departure and said in a statement it hoped to name a replacement “shortly”.

In its most recent half-year results, the company reported a 1.6% fall in its post-tax profit.

Barnes joined the media firm in July 2016 and was present when Nine bought newspaper publisher Fairfax Media two years later, in one of the biggest shake-ups in Australian media for decades.

News of Barnes’s departure comes days after Nine offered to buy all of Macquarie Media , a deal which would make it the first Australian media company with outright ownership in free-to-air television, print and radio assets.

Nine shares have jumped more than 35% so far this year and closed 1.6% higher on Wednesday.

(Reporting by Devika Syamnath in Bengaluru; Editing by Stephen Coates)