Herbalife, the embattled nutritional products company, has added Weber Shandwick alum Marcus Reese in the new post of VP for state and local government affairs.

Reese has consulted for the company for the past year as chief of staff at PA shop Tusk Strategies, where he also handled local issue campaigns for Uber, AT&T and Wal-Mart.

He was senior VP for Weber Shandwick's corporate issues team and senior director at crisis specialists Smith & Co. He worked on the political side for George W. Bush and Staten Island District Attorney Dan Donovan, among others.

Alan Hoffman, EVP of global corporate affairs at Herbalife, which has weathered pressure from activist investor Bill Ackman and suffered on Wall Street, said Reese is an important addition "as we continue to inform and educate key thought leaders about the positive impact Herbalife is having on communities across the nation."

Hoffman, a top policy exec at PepsiCo and former deputy chief of staff to Vice President Joe Biden, joined Herbalife in July.

The company employs a successful direct selling business model that has sparked federal and state probes and that Ackman has dubbed a pyramid scheme. A key argument for Ackman is that its model exploits minority distributors of the products. 

Recommended article: Chomsky: We Are All – Fill in the Blank.
This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service - if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers.