Returning to his seat after setting out his vision for Ahold's future last week, Mr Anders Moberg, chief executive of the embattled Dutch grocery group, shot a supportive smile at Mr Larry Benjamin, the man charged with rebuilding US Foodservice.

It was Mr Benjamin's fifth day as chief executive of the distribution unit at the centre of a €970 million accounting scandal that Mr Moberg said "almost destroyed this company".

Mr Benjamin has between 18 and 24 months to keep his boss smiling. In an interview with the Financial Times, Mr Moberg said he was postponing a decision on whether the business that cost Ahold nearly $8 billion (€6.9 billion) to assemble was worth hanging on to in order to "have more choices".

But after Ahold gave details of its turnaround plan on Friday, US Foodservice will have to move fast to prove its worth to its Dutch parent.

Under Mr Moberg's plans, Ahold will soon issue up to 625 million new ordinary shares in a rights issue designed to raise €2.5 billion. It will also raise a similar amount through disposals over two years.

By the time that strategy is complete, US Foodservice may also have been sold.

"[If that is the case\] then I will have extracted a lot of value," says Mr Moberg, the former Ikea chief executive.

It was his ambition, he said, to ensure that the price it might fetch then would be a great deal more than when Ahold first looked to sell in the aftermath of the scandal. "You know what we paid for the company. To sell it \ would be really bad for shareholders.

"I am convinced that in 18-24 months we will get it back where it should be, then we will have to take the strategic decision whether we keep it."

While the clock ticks on the turnaround plan, Mr Benjamin must also rebuild a management team swept away by the scandal.

"The organisation lost full transparency of its cost base, which opened the door to fraud and abuse," Mr Benjamin told journalists.

Its five most senior executives departed, two being dismissed for their alleged part in the fraud, while more than 20 other managers - some of senior rank, according to Mr Moberg - remain suspended. A decision on their future will come within a month.

Meanwhile, the unit, which reported a €314 million operating profit last year, will be lossmaking this year.

"You can see that prices are deteriorating and we have not been able to keep costs under control. It is very clear we have to take action," Mr Morberg said.

Nonetheless, Ahold has some way to go before it understands the workings of its US offspring.

"We have a lot of information," he said. "It is not always presented the way we would like, so we have spent a lot of time with it to understand it."

He said the company had asked the US Securities & Exchange Commission, which is conducting its own probe of US Foodservice, whether "puffing" - whereby vendors were over-billed for promotional allowances - "is common in the industry".

Ahold intends appointing two industry experts with customer or supply-side experience to an advisory board installed to support Mr Benjamin.

In spite of the fact that the suspended employees hail from across US Foodservice's labyrinthine branch network, it was Mr Moberg's view that the root of the financial crisis lay at head office, in Columbia, Maryland.

In one week, Mr Benjamin has met executives running all 82 US Foodservice branches. His assessment is that "the problem was more in the centre than in the field", said Mr Moberg.

"The question is always who gave the orders. Some of those are on a lower level. If their superiors told them how to run the business, they believed that was the right thing, so we can't blame them.

"We have to see what the starting point was and that came out of the centre. There were simply no controls." - (Financial Times Service)