* CCO's past position at Braun disputed by former employer
* Carrefour declines to comment on story or exec's position
* Carrefour sources say exec misrepresented himself
* Exec refuses comment
By Lionel Laurent
PARIS, March 25 (Reuters) - Carrefour, the world's No. 2 retailer, is facing embarrassing questions over the appointment of a senior executive whose previous employer disputes that he held the top role claimed in his profile.
When Paris-based Carrefour hired Jose Carlos Gonzalez-Hurtado away from Procter & Gamble to take the newly created post of chief commercial officer in Nov. 2009, the food retailer heralded his recent promotion to worldwide head of P&G's male grooming unit Braun.
"In 2006, he was appointed Vice President of Global Braun Male Products, and in 2008, he was put in charge of Braun globally," the press release said in November 2009, language that is echoed in the profile of the Spaniard -- now a member of Carrefour's board - on the retailer's website.
But according both to Braun itself and to the P&G unit's former head, Gonzalez-Hurtado's promotion from vice president to president of the unit is a fiction.
"That is not accurate," Braun spokesman Lars Atorf said, stating that Hurtado had never been president at the P&G unit, best known for its electric razors. "When you are in the role of vice-president you are number two, you are leading the brand-building."
Procter & Gamble's annual reports for 2008 and 2009 cite Juan Pedro Hernandez as the president of Braun. Reached by Reuters, Hernandez said: "I was the only president of Braun."
Hernandez added P&G alerted Carrefour when the retailer announced the hire. "In his profile it was portrayed that he was President of Braun -- we simply informed Carrefour that this wasn't right," he said.
Carrefour, among Procter & Gamble's biggest customers, declined to comment. The group last week removed a French-language biography of Gonzalez-Hurtado from its website.
When asked if the executive was still occupying his current role at Carrefour, a spokeswoman said: "No comment."
Carrefour was only last month rocked by the surprise exit of its Executive Director for Europe, Vicente Trius, now at Loblaw . The French retailer is in the midst of a turnaround plan under new management and has struggled with waning investor confidence after two profit warnings last year.
"FALSE CLAIMS"
Gonzalez-Hurtado, whose profile on business networking website LinkedIn says he was "President Global Braun" and "responsible for the Braun business Procter & Gamble globally," also declined repeated requests for comment.
Sources within Carrefour say Gonzalez-Hurtado presented himself as Braun's president throughout the recruiting process through which he was brought on board as part of a batch of new appointments under Chief Executive Lars Olofsson.
"He claimed to be in the top 40 at Procter & Gamble when he was only in the top 200," one of the sources said.
Carrefour's head of human resources at the time declined to comment. Executive search firm Spencer Stuart -- understood to have been responsible for the hire -- did not return a request for comment.
Gonzalez-Hurtado would not be the first job seeker to embellish his resume. But other leading executives who were found to have inflated their qualifications have sometimes come under severe pressure to step down.
Intercontinental, the world's biggest hotelier, said in 2007 the head of its Asia-Pacific business had quit, just before taking up a position on the group's board, after an internal review found he had lied about his academic background.
A year earlier, the chief executive of U.S. electricals retailer RadioShack resigned after also admitting he had overstated his qualifications.
(Additional reporting by Mark Potter; Editing by David Cowell)