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NEW BOARD PLANS PENN TURNAROUND

NEW YORK -- The new chairman of Penn Traffic Co., Syracuse, N.Y., said last week the company's new board of directors hopes to take an active role in helping turn the company around, following its emergence two weeks ago from Chapter 11.to the company's success, he said, will be the group effort by the company's directors and management.According to Zurkow, the role of the board is "to give support

NEW YORK -- The new chairman of Penn Traffic Co., Syracuse, N.Y., said last week the company's new board of directors hopes to take an active role in helping turn the company around, following its emergence two weeks ago from Chapter 11.

to the company's success, he said, will be the group effort by the company's directors and management.

According to Zurkow, the role of the board is "to give support to the company's professional managers, to be an objective resource against which those managers can bounce ideas, and to be a creative voice that helps when it can in moving the company forward."

Zurkow succeeded Gary D. Hirsch, who chaired Penn Traffic for 12 years. Hirsch will continue as a Penn Traffic director and assume the title of chairman of the executive committee, Zurkow said.

Penn Traffic's new 10-member board includes three holdovers from the previous board and seven independent directors, one of whom is Zurkow. The other directors are:

Hirsch, former chairman and a director since 1987; Martin A. Fox, former vice chairman and a director since 1993; and Joseph V. Fisher, president, chief executive officer and a director since last November, two months prior to the Chapter 11 filing.

Two retailers: Byron Allumbaugh, retired chairman of Ralphs Grocery Co., Los Angeles; and Thomas W. Harberts, owner of Harberts Foods, a Cub Food Stores operator in Oshkosh, Wis., and former president of Byerly's, Minneapolis.

Kevin Collins, principal in The Old Hill Co., Westport, Conn., a corporate financial firm that specializes in advising companies going through transitions.

Three representatives of Satellite Asset Management, the chain's largest single shareholder: Gabe Nechamkin, Lief Rosenblatt and Mark Sonnino. Satellite is a New York-based investment firm that manages funds controlled by George Soros.

Zurkow was a director of Kash 'N Karry Food Stores, Tampa, Fla., from 1994, when the company emerged from bankruptcy, until 1996, when it was sold to Food Lion, Salisbury, N.C.; and during 1997 and 1998 he was a board member of Streamline Inc., Westwood, Mass., an on-line grocery supplier.

Zurkow became managing director of PaineWebber's investment-banking division a year ago, after two years as managing director of its principal transaction group, which oversees a portfolio of alternative and direct equity investments.

From 1992 to 1996 he was managing director of PaineWebber's high-yield fixed-income department, where he managed a portfolio of bankrupt and financially distressed credits, and from 1986 through 1992 he was an associate managing director in the risk-arbitrage department of Wertheim, Schroder (now Schroder's), New York.