Archie Norman, the former Tory MP, has lured a number of British supermarket executives to run the Coles chain in Australia, to which the former Asda boss is a senior adviser.

Norman is an adviser to Wesfarmers, the Australian company that bought Coles last year for £9.99bn. He has tempted a raft of top UK retailers to move 10,000 miles in what he has dubbed the "most exciting turnaround opportunity in global retail".

Andy Coleman, the director of central operations at J Sainsbury, will join Australia's second largest supermarket group in August as a senior member of the management team. Coleman currently reports to Roger Burnley, a member of Sainsbury's operating board, and is seen as a rising star at the company.

Jonathan Reeve, a manager in Tesco's operations development team, has been poached to join Coles in July, and Stuart Machin, Asda's current operations director for the south of the UK, joins as retail director in August. Joe Blundell, a former Asda marketing executive, joins the retailer as marketing director in the summer, and John Durkan, the chief operating officer of Carphone Warehouse, starts at Coles in July.

The men join Ian McLeod, Coles' chief executive, who took up the post earlier this year after resigning as chief executive of Halfords, the listed car-parts retailer. McLeod, a Scot, worked with Norman at Asda for about a decade until he left in 2001 to run Celtic, the football club.

Many of the Coles positions were filled by Barracuda Search, a London-based retail headhunter.

McLeod recently told Australian journalists that he was "horrified" by the standards of cleanliness, stock levels and operating standards that he found in a number of stores.

He said that Coles will be a three- to five-year turnaround job. But he said the company is in no worse shape than Asda was when Norman took the reins in 1991.
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