Shareholders in GlaxoSmithKline are at loggerheads over whether the company should bow to activist pressure by splitting up the UK’s biggest drugmaker and overhauling its board.
Neil Woodford, the former head of UK equities at Invesco Perpetual who now runs his own investment management company, has called for GSK to undergo a radical restructuring into four separate companies, rather than one £68bn giant, to release value while the US hedge fund Och-Ziff is urging it to start planning for the departure of chief executive Sir Andrew Witty.
