Heather Bresch dumped more than 100,000 shares of Mylan — just two weeks before EpiPen scandal

August 29, 2016 in News by RBN Staff

 

Source: Raw Story | By 

The embattled CEO of Mylan dumped more than 10 percent of her shares of the pharmaceutical company’s stock as analysts warned she could become the next “Pharma bro.”

Heather Bresch sold off 100,200 shares of Mylan stock on Aug. 9, the same day the drugmaker released its most recent earnings report amid questions over the swiftly ballooning cost of EpiPens, reported The Guardian.

Wells Fargo analyst David Maris issued a report in early June pointing out that Mylan had jacked up the prices of seven products by 100 percent more, while raising the cost of another 24 products by at least 20 percent.

Maris warned that Bresch and her company could face a similar public relations nightmare as Martin Shkreli, who became widely loathed after raising the cost of the anti-nausea drug Daraprim by more than 5,000 percent.

Shkreli was arrested in December on security fraud charges related to a hedge fund he co-founded, and he later resigned as CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals.

Bresch had other warnings that she and her company were about to become similarly toxic.

Other media outlets — including CNBC, Bloomberg and FiercePharma — published reports questioning Mylan’s price hikes, and Bloomberg reported in September 2015 how Bresch had turned EpiPen into a marketing success and raised its price 400 percent.

EpiPen jumped in price by 15 percent twice more since then, and Slate last month questioned the life-saving allergy drugs cost in a story titled: “There’s absolutely no reason why an EpiPen should cost $300.”

Bresch dumped hundreds of thousands of Mylan shares one month and one day after Slate’s report.

A company spokeswoman said the Aug. 9 transaction was made as part of a 10b5 plan, which executives at publicly traded companies use to establish a waiting period to avoid suspicion of trading based on non-public information.

“Simply put, 10b5 plans are used to avoid being suspected of insider trading,” wroteThe Guardian‘s Jana Kasperkevic.

Mylan’s stock price dropped from $49 on Aug. 18 to $42.91 on Aug. 26, after the EpiPen controversy erupted.

Bresch, who has seen her own pay shoot up by 671 percent over the past nine years, currently holds 828,318 shares of Mylan.

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