At the company’s annual meeting, Mylan (NSDQ:MYL) shareholders re-elected the drugmaker’s board despite a campaign spearheaded by major investors to do otherwise.
The campaign hoped to encourage shareholders to vote down most of the board’s directors in response to Mylan’s drug pricing practices for its EpiPen device. The influential proxy advisory firm, ISS, also urged shareholders last week to vote against the directors.
Although Mylan’s board was re-elected, the campaign managed to land a win, since shareholders voted against the company’s executive compensation structure. Earlier this year, Mylan revealed that chairman Robert Coury reeled in a $97 million pay package in 2016.
Unseating a director would have required at least 2/3 of votes cast, as well as more than half of Mylan’s outstanding shares.
The company’s annual meeting was held in Amsterdam. Quirijn Bongaerts, a shareholder from the Dutch small shareholders association VEB, reportedly challenged Coury regarding his executive compensation and ethics.
Mylan has previously defended Coury’s pay, writing that “the Board focused on structuring his compensation in this new role to ensure long-term retention for at least a 5-year period and to ensure that his compensation was significantly weighted toward equity-based compensation to further align his interests with those of our shareholders.”
Also today, a report from STAT found that Mylan offered discounts to at least 6 state Medicaid programs in exchange for “preferred” status that would make it easier for patients to get its EpiPen device. Competitor devices, like Sanofi‘s (NYSE:SNY)Auvi-Q, would require special requests to be covered.
This kind of arrangement is legal and common in the pharmaceutical industry, but experts pointed out that this new information could bolster Sanofi’s antitrust case against the EpiPen-maker.
Material from Reuters was used in this report.
