Apple Inc.'s departing chief financial officer Peter Oppenheimerpresided over a sales boom that filled company coffers with arecord cash pile. His successor, Luca Maestri, inherits a companystung by slowing growth and increasing scrutiny of how it handlesthat hoard.

The Italian-born executive is becoming Apple's main money manand liaison to Wall Street in June, at a time when the world's mostvaluable company is under pressure to reverse a stock slide, wardoff activist investors and defend a cash strategy that critics sayshields it from paying taxes.

“When you're the CFO of the number one company in the world, youhave a pretty big magnifying glass on you,” said Laurence Balter,an analyst at Oracle Investment Research, which advisesshareholders.