By Mark Gregory BBC World Service business correspondent in Scheveningen

The man recently appointed to head Dutch retail giant Ahold once took his son on holiday to Japan.

He is also not very good at Golf.

Albert Heijn is well-loved in Holland

These less than sensational personal details were revealed by Anders Molberg, the new Swedish chief executive of Ahold, at a tense special meeting of shareholders at Scheveningen, near The Hague.

The meeting gave small investors their first real chance to confront the management of the company involved in the Netherlands' worst financial scandal of modern times.

Ahold, which owns the main Dutch supermarket chain Albert Heijn, has admitted that profits at an American subsidiary, Foodservices, were overstated by $880m.

Grovelling apology

In a sense, it did not matter what Mr Molberg, who ran iconic Swedish retailer Ikea for more than 10 years, said to shareholders.

The important thing was that he had agreed to take the job.

As one grey-haired investor put it at the meeting: "A man with a distinguished track record like Mr Molberg - would he put his reputation on the line by taking charge of a company he thought was going to go bust?"

The meeting began with a grovelling apology.

Henny Ruiter, chairman of Ahold's supervisory board, said the day the scandal broke was an all-time low for the company.

And he could well imagine the anger, frustration and incomprehension felt by shareholders.

Bewilderment

Many of the 300 or so shareholders who attended the meeting were elderly, as is often the case at these kind of gatherings.

Some seemed angry.

Most expressed sadness and bewilderment at what had happened to one of Holland's proudest corporate names.

The biggest round of applause came when one shareholder, Pieter Lakeman, said senior Ahold executives who resigned at the time of the scandal should not receive any form of pay-off.

And he said the company should begin legal action to extract damages from them.

Anti-American feeling

Mr Lakeman stormed away from the microphone, after saying it would be outrageous if failure at the top was rewarded with a pay-off running into millions of euros.

Did the problems begin in the States?

There was also an undercurrent of anti-American feeling.

One shareholder said Ahold's problems began when it got involved in the United States.

He said Americans did business differently and more aggressively than Europeans.

And Europeans always ended up getting cheated.

There were other comments in a similar vein.

Expletive deleted

Among those attending the meeting was Ahold's former long-term boss Albert Heijn, now wheelchair-bound and in his seventies.

He is a direct descendent of the man who founded the company more than a century ago.

When the financial scandal broke in February, Mr Heijn famously used a four letter Anglo-Saxon expletive to describe the performance of the management.

On this occasion, he smiled sweetly at reporters and said there signs Ahold was getting back on its feet.

The three hour meeting was held in a theatre complex. It had to finish at 6pm to make way for the evening performance of the opera Aida.