December 5, 2014
By Riley McDermid, BioSpace.com Breaking News Editor
The high tax burden imposed upon companies by the French government is hindering Sanofi’s search for a new chief executive, Chairman Serge Weinberg said Thursday.
“The deterioration of French tax-competitiveness and the burden on companies and individuals pose a problem,” Weinberg told reporters in Paris.
“It’s extremely difficult to attract international executives or even bring back French ones who have left. There will be consequences if this continues, because we can’t rely on patriotic sentiment or goodwill alone.”
The situation is likely an ironic one for Weinberg, who was instrumental in ousting Sanofi’s last CEO, Christian Viehbacher, only to find that candidates for the position seem to be thin on the ground. In the interim, Weinberg must fill the role himself, in addition to his duties as chairman.
Reuters reported that Weinberg declined to comment on rumors that Smith & Nephew French chief Olivier Bohuon had turned down the CEO job at Sanofi.
“We have no comment on the subject,” Weinberg said, because he was only speaking “in general” about the difficulty of finding top talent for the position.
Sanofi’s board of directors fired Viehbacher on Oct. 29 because of “strategic differences,” including Viehbacher’s plan to sell the company’s portfolio of mature drugs worth about $7.9 billion.
Although Viehbacher was popular with shareholders because he managed to double the firm’s stock price during his tenure, management had long been at odds with him, particularly because he was the first non-French Sanofi chief executive. When he moves his family to Boston last year, spending only about a third of his time in France, the board acted to remove him.
