Chief executive of Troubled commodities trading firm Noble Group, Yusuf Alireza  had quit for “family reasons,” the company has said.  The stock of the company went down more than 3 percent in early trade soon after the announcement.

With Jeff Frase, a former JPMorgan banker who joined Noble as president of its Americas business in November, the president of the company, William Randall, has been appointed as the co-chief executive, Noble said. Randall is based in Hong Kong and Frase in Connecticut.

With the company’s asset disposal program near-complete, Alireza “considered that the time was right for him to move on” and that he had helped guide Noble through a very challenging period, said the directors at Noble through a statement announcing the changes.

Over the last year Yusuf Alireza had insisted that it was selling the right assets to become nimbler and more profitable even as detractors had attacked the company. Freeing up cash and balance sheet resources to expand into more profitable areas, such as energy trading Alireza sold the company’s agricultural unit, one of its biggest drags. All this while, the company faced the worst stock rout in its history.

Nobel, the Hong Kong-based, Singapore-listed trader, will continue to have its founder Richard Ellman in the role as chairman and executive director of the company.

“The board expects to announce some further additional leadership appointments in due course as the business developments dictate,” the company said.

With a sale expected to generate “significant cash proceeds and profits to substantially enhance the balance sheet,” Noble also said that it would put its Americas Energy Solutions business on the block. Nobel had bought the Noble Americas Energy Solutions, an electricity-trading unit from the commodity-trading venture between Sempra Energy and RBS in 2010.

There have been repeated blows over the last one year that Nobel has had to deal with. After Iceberg Research published a report alleging that Noble’s accounting treatments were creating “fabricated” profits, the traders’ stock has tanked since February 2015. The company has already been hit by the global slump in commodities prices.

The company was cut to junk status in January by ratings agencies Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s, despite Noble’s vociferous denials of Iceberg’s report where the company alleged that Iceberg is run by a disgruntled former employee – and the implementation of a program of asset sales to bolster its balance sheet.

On the back of a $1.2 billion writedown on weak coal prices, the company reported its first annual loss since 1998 in February.

Saying that the company’s debt maturity profile was weakening,  Fitch Ratings became the last of the big ratings houses to remove Noble’s investment grade rating on May 17. It gave the trader a “stable” outlook,

(Adapted from CNBC & Bloomberg)