This was carried out to improve the liquidity of the stock.
No it wasn't, the stock was already very liquid. Stock splits are carried out to give investors a "feel-good" factor as people subconsciously think they're better off with double the number of shares. Often after a split, the price artificially and irrationally rises before falling back. It's a typical smoke and mirror technique most often used when management want to distract investors. I reckon ryr management will want to do a lot of ditracting over the next while.
As an investor, micko has presided over the wholesale destruction of my wealth and built a model that looks incapable of recovering my (now lack of) wealth in the future.
As an employee, he has built an operational model conducive to far more safety-related incidents than average while creating an awful place to work.
From either point of view, he has to go.