The departure of American Apparel CFO Ken Cieply has to be one of the most preposterous tales I've heard in the business world for a long time. Cieply left the uber-trendy seller of overpriced spandex leggings last week, after CEO and founder Dov Charney incredibly called his CFO "a complete loser" in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, adding that the Canadian had "no credibility" in the retail apparel industry. Presumably he wasn't counting that time when Cieply took Canadian no-brand sweater company Gildan Activewear to market. Smelling blood, WSJ got on the blower to Charney after the story ran and reported that the CEO retracted his comment as "juvenile", adjusting his views to saying that Cieply had "enormous credibility" in the manufacturing world - but lacked extensive retail experience. Announcing Cieply's departure a fortnight after that, Charney went full circle and said of his outgoing CFO that "his impressive pedigree in apparel was a key reason I asked him two years ago to come down to Los Angeles to help take our business to the next level".

This Jekyll-and-Hyde-ism from a listed-company CEO is rare, but seems the stock in trade of the AA founder: he adds foot in mouth disease to alleged sexual harassment of female staff, chronic corporate unreadiness for public life (the company wasn't GAAP ready when it went public last year), and has a knack for scaring off financiers (Charney said auditors of the company that claimed it inflated earnings were "exaggerating". The audit was conducted for potential private investors who would have provided much-needed growth capital).

After the last CFO died unexpectedly of a heart attack in 2005, an interim CFO came and went within a week. Cieply's attempts to shore up very shaky finances only exposed AA's weaknesses: perhaps the embarassment was what spurred the CEO's 'loser' comment.

All this will hearten Cieply's successor, William Gochnauer, who leaves his interim CFO role at catalogue gifts company Red Envelope for the same title at AA. Gochnauer's USP, Charney says, is his "extensive experience with SEC reporting and Sarbanes-Oxley compliance" - and this second interim CFO must now build a finance function that can handle its new reporting burden as a public company. AA has stated it intends to hire a permanent CFO in the next six months.