May 15, 2015
By Riley McDermid, BioSpace.com Breaking News Sr. Editor
The abrupt resignation of Aegerion Pharmaceuticals, Inc. ’s chief financial officer, Mark Fitzpatrick, was based on Fitzpatrick’s move to an unnamed company and not the result of internal infighting in the executive suite, a spokeswoman for the company told BioSpace Friday.
A source from Aegerion had told BioSpace Fitzpatrick’s resignation was due to internal company pressures leading to his ouster, but Amanda Murphy, associate director of investor relations and public relations, told BioSpace that isn’t the case.
“Mark is moving on to a company more aligned with his experience at a pre-commercial, development stage company,” said Murphy. “This was a personal decision for him and was in no way related to disagreement with the Board or the executive team of Aegerion.”
Murphy said Fitzpatrick’s new company will be named on Monday.
Embattled Aegerion Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (AEGR) was back in the headlines Friday, after announcing Fitzpatrick’s resignation, saying he’d be replaced by David Aubuchon, Aegerion‘s chief accounting officer. At the time, the company gave no reason for the removal and said the transition will happen sometime in the next month, leaving the market to speculate on the abrupt departure.
Aegerion had a tough winter, when news hit in early January that the firm’s top 10 investors are attempting to stage a coup against Beer and will try to force a sale of the company after its stock hit rock bottom in 2014. Whether Fitzpatrick’s ousting was part of a shareholder appeasement strategy has now been formally denied by the company.
Ten unnamed shareholders told Aegerion‘s board that because the company’s share price fell the most of any biotech last year, they want Beer replaced and a possible sale explored.
Beer also publicly embarrassed Aegerion by being named in a long-running divorce and drug accusation saga involving boutique investment bank Jefferies and Co.; becoming the target of an unrelated U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) probe into whether or not he had misled investigators about cholesterol drug Juxtapid; and finally, landing himself in hot water with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over “previously disclosed investigations by government authorities in Brazil into whether the company’s activities in Brazil violated Brazilian anti-corruption laws.”
Still, Aegerion is sticking to its guns, and reiterated it wouldn’t comment one way or the other on the story—a sign the biotech may not necessarily be 100 percent behind its CEO, but is not ready to announce a transition in the C-level suite.
“We don’t plan to comment on the article as it’s our policy not to comment on rumors or speculation such as this,” said Amanda Murphy, Aegerion‘s manager of investor and public relations, in an emailed statement to reporters.
Beer was among a group of executives accused by a woman, Christina Kelly, of rampant drug use and sexual escapades within the health care and biotech investment group at Jefferies.
Christina Kelly made the allegations during vicious divorce proceedings from Jefferies investment banker Sage Kelly, accusing him of indulging in “alcohol, cocaine, mushrooms, Special-K, heroin” as well as other drugs like ecstasy.
The filing also dragged the firm itself into the accusations, saying Kelly was once “so drunk at the annual party that he hosts for members of his department at Jefferies & Company that he began to urinate”—and it included a list of Jefferies employees with whom both Kellys had used illegal drugs.
The story took another bizarre twist in October, when Jefferies chief executive, frustrated by the allegations of drug use at the unit, spontaneously volunteered the group for drug tests.
“We went to our partners in health care investment banking yesterday afternoon and said, ‘The two of us are going to go take a drug test, and do you want to join us?’” recounted CEO Richard Handler in a memo sent to clients Oct. 31. They did and none reportedly tested positive.
Once a settlement was reached, Kelly eventually apologized to the bank and her soon-to-be ex-husband, though she did not specify which part of her story she considered false.
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A promising new blood cancer therapy from AbbVie and Genentech that snagged headlines in early December for unexpectedly high rates of response in clinical trial patients has now been granted breakthrough status from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the companies said last week. The investigational drug, dubbed venetoclax, is an inhibitor of the B-cell lymphoma-2 (BCL-2) protein that is being developed by Abbvie in partnership with Genentech and Roche . BioSpace wants to know what you think this means for the broader market—and could venetoclax be a game changer?
