By Mark Gregory BBC World Service business correspondent

Investors have had their first chance to confront managers of the Dutch grocery giant Ahold over an $880m (�547m) black hole in the company's accounts.

At the firm's annual meeting the acting chief executive Henny de Ruiter offered shareholders his "sincere apologies" for the scandal at the US subsidiary.

Ahold is embroiled in the biggest corporate scandal to hit the Netherlands in recent times.

Some say the scandal is Europe's Enron, with Tuesday's meeting seen as the first chance for shareholders to vent their anger at management.

But this is much more than just another complicated book-keeping scandal.

Ahold's main Albert Heijn supermarket chain is a feature of almost every Dutch High Street, and many of its Dutch shareholders are also its customers.

Owning up

Ahold, the world's third largest grocery retailer, admitted last week to overstating profits at an American subsidiary, Foodservice, by $800m over three years - nearly double its initial estimate when it first admitted problems in February.

The profits overstatement came from the way discounts given by suppliers for bulk purchases of goods were treated in the accounts.

But it came as a stunning shock - to the Dutch, Albert Heijn is as much a part of everyday life as tulips, windmills or liberal drugs laws.

The US Justice Department and the financial regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission, have now begun investigations and several senior executives have resigned or have been dismissed.

On Monday the company announced a series of new executive appointments, among them Dirk Anbeek, who is promoted to chief financial officer of Ahold Europe.

But the Dutch shopper-investors have lost a great deal of money, and many of them want answers.

Dwindling value

Ahold's share price is half what it was in February when the scandal broke, and a fraction of the value at the peak three years ago.

To make matters worse, the shares are among the most widely held in Holland.

Investment professionals had been worried about Ahold's approach to bookkeeping for some time before the scandal broke.

But for countless small shareholder-shoppers, the revelations were a complete surprise.

This, after all, is a company that has been in business for more than a century.

Questions, questions

According to investigators from PriceWaterhouseCoopers, the events that directly caused the scandal were focussed very much on Ahold's Foodservice business in America, and may even have involved just a very few people.

But there have also been questions raised about Ahold's accounting practices in its Latin American and Swedish operations.

The whole company had expanded at breakneck speed with a series of international acquisitions in the 1990s, all with borrowed money.

As with so many other stars of the corporate world in that era, Ahold appeared to do well for a time.

Then, as the markets fell and the global economy began to slow, financial problems began to emerge.

Shareholders will no doubt ask some tough questions at Tuesday's shareholders meeting, for which there are few answers at the moment.

As well as the damage to its reputation, Ahold is struggling to repay some $12bn of debt.

The company has announced plans to sell businesses in Latin America and Asia, but these will only raise small sums.

Some analysts believe that ultimately break-up is the only option - that could even include selling off the crown jewels like Albert Heijn.