Not much more than three months after signing on for another three years, Brian Evans is leaving his role as chief executive of heatset web printer PMP “by mutual agreement” … and with an expected $2 million payout. An announcement to the Australian stock exchange on Wednesday (January 28) says chief financial officer Richard Alley will act as chief executive while the search continues for a replacement, expected to take until April. He will be assisted by non-executive director Ian Fraser, a former managing director of TNT. The PMP announcement – password protected and marked ‘for personal use only’ on the company’s website – adds that the company is reviewing the structure of its executive team in the light of current economic conditions. A former chief operating officer of Fairfax Media who swapped some roles when David Kirk left PMP to head Fairfax, Evans joined the company when it was in the midst of a major reequipment of its Australian plants. The order for two 64-page manroland Lithoman and four 32-page presses, was one of the local industry’s largest. PMP was created in 1991 by the merger and spin-off of News Limited’s Southdown Press and Attic Futura magazine operations and its Australian printing division. The package included book printer Griffin Press, and the Progress Press, Wilke Color and Wilke Directories catalogue and directory printing businesses, and was soon joined by privately-owned prepress trade house Show-Ads. Talks of a merger with IPMG in 2001 ended bitterly. In recent years, PMP has struggled with competition in an oversupplied market. ACP has said it will move its magazines from PMP to its own plant in 2011, and last year supermarket chain Coles moved its catalogue printing business to IPMG and some distribution to Salmat.