The industry has seen some high profile exits this month, with several individuals vacating, or being asked to vacate, positions on the C-suite.
The long-serving CFO of Gilead will depart from their role, though they will stay on until full-year financials have been posted for 2019. While one controversial company, which has made headlines for a long-running court case, has decided to refresh its leadership positions.
In addition, one CEO was recently placed under a huge amount of pressure after a shareholder vote went against them.
The industry has seen some high profile exits this month, with several individuals vacating, or being asked to vacate, positions on the C-suite.
The long-serving CFO of Gilead will depart from their role, though they will stay on until full-year financials have been posted for 2019. While one controversial company, which has made headlines for a long-running court case, has decided to refresh its leadership positions.
In addition, one CEO was recently placed under a huge amount of pressure after a shareholder vote went against them.
This week, it was announced that long-serving Gilead CFO, Robin Washington, will retire from her role, effective March 1, 2020. Washington has been in the role for 11 years and holds responsibility across finance, investor relation, facilities and operations, and IT organisations.
Gilead will begin the search for a replacement immediately and, should one be found prior to her departure date, Washington will transition into an advisory role. She will remain with the company until full-year 2019 financials are posted.
“During my short time here, I have been impressed with the strategic expertise that Robin brings to her role and the dedication she has for our mission and the patients we serve. It is equally clear that she has built a strong team across the organizations she leads,” said Daniel O’Day, CEO of Gilead, who has been in his current role since December 2018.
Shortly before Gilead informed of Washington’s departure from the role, Alphabet, the parent company of Google, revealed that she would be joining the company as part of its board of directors. Washington will take up a position on the company’s leadership and development and compensation committee.
Insys Therapeutics is well-known for its product, Subsys, a sublingual spray of fentanyl, which has hit the headlines due to a court case determining whether former executives are guilty of having bribed doctors to prescribe the powerful pain killer. It was announced today that the founder of the company, John Kapoor, and four colleagues were convicted of the charges against them.
As part of the company’s efforts to reshape its leadership amidst such negative publicity, it announced that Saeed Motahari would step down as CEO and be replaced by CFO, Andrew Long.
Motahari had been in the position for two years, after joining the company from another company that experienced its own legal troubles, Purdue Pharma.
Long has worked at the company for a similar length of time and moves into the role from within the company, after holding the role of CFO previously.
Unlike Motahari, Long’s previous working record consists of companies that are not linked to the opioid crisis in North America – having previously worked at Abbot Laboratories, Cambrex, and Thermo Fisher Scientific.
Long worked in the latter position for nine years, before becoming SVP of global finance at Patheon, a subsidiary of Thermo Fisher.
Replacing Long as CFO at the company will be Andrece Housley, currently corporate controller. While an additional leadership change sees Venkat Goskonda become CSO of the company.
Reported in its first quarter financials, Novartis appointed Richard Saynor as CEO of its generics business, Sandoz. In this position, he will also become a member of the executive committee of Novartis, reporting to Vas Narasimhan, CEO of Novartis.
Saynor will arrive at the business already knowing it well, after having worked at Sandoz for five years until 2010, as its regional head for Asia Pacific and as part of the Sandoz executive committee. Saynor is set to join the business on August 1, 2019.
For the last nine years, he has been working at GSK, as the company’s SVP and global head of classic and established medicines. In this position, he manages $10bn (€8.9bn) worth of assets across 120 countries.
Prior to Sandoz and GSK, he worked at Generics UK, part of Mylan, and is a trained pharmacist.
Saynor will enter the role during a period of uncertainty regarding the future of the Sandoz business within the overall Novartis structure.
In the same financials, Novartis reported that sales were down by 2% for the unit, amid a trend that has seen pricing pressure in the US market weigh heavily on companies producing generics. The company also shed part of its US generics business at the end of 2018.
Jean-Luc Lowinski has joined the Pierre Fabre Group as CEO of Pierre Fabre Pharmaceuticals, and he will also sit on the executive committee of the company.
In the role, Lowinski will be responsible for developing the company’s activities in oncology, prescription drugs, and consumer health care.
According to the company, the pharmaceutical division generated €880m ($981m) during 2018.
Prior to joining Pierre Fabre, he spent seven years at Sanofi, where he ended his time as SVP of Sanofi Genzyme emerging markets. He also worked at Bayer for 20 years as the company’s global head of its animal health division.
Werner Baumann is still CEO of Bayer, but his position was called into question after the company’s annual stockholders’ meeting saw 55% of shareholders vote against ratifying the actions of the board of management.
The vote is widely regarded as a protest against the considerable drop in the share price of Bayer following the closure of the German company’s deal to acquire Monsanto.
Doubts have spread due to the loss of a court case wherein an individual suggested that the purchased company’s product, Roundup (glyphosate), caused his cancer – a US jury found in favour of the individual.
With this case, Bayer is facing the prospect of a huge number of court cases, estimated to be approximately 11,200, and the potential for a number of expensive settlements.
The shareholder rebellion against Baumann and the company’s board is not a legally binding vote, which means the board, and Baumann in particular, will not be forced to act.
However, Werner Wenning, chairman of the supervisory board at Bayer, said, “The outcome of the vote does nonetheless show that the annual stockholders’ meeting wanted to send a clear signal to the board of management that Bayer should bring out the company’s strengths to a greater extent in the future.”
The situation is highly unusual, with such votes commonly passed with large majorities and even the supervisory board, which is responsible for monitoring the action of board management in German corporate structure, only passed its own vote by 66%.
