re post. of very lengthy article.. Wondering what the author of this article would make of the situation now, could he now provide any further insight perhaps in a new article?
Who Killed the Billionaire Founder of a Generic Drug Empire?
October 24, 2018
By Matthew Campbell
''I was there to see Jack Kay, Sherman’s right-hand man of more than 30 years, who’d been named chief executive officer in January. He was working out of Sherman’s old office, just a few steps from reception. The Apotex founder rarely discarded a document, and it had taken a team of lawyers to sift through the towering piles of legal pleadings, patent filings, and scrawled notes that once covered every surface. Now it was clean and corporate, with a few neat rows of files and a shelf of souvenir pill bottles.
Eager to report this story the way I would any other, I was careful not to mention my background when I requested an interview with Kay. He knew it anyway. “You’re Barry’s son,” he said as I entered. “I know your father.”
At 77 years old, Kay is slight, with a thin fuzz of white hair—Sherman’s physical and temperamental opposite. As Apotex grew, he enjoyed its material fruits more enthusiastically than his self-denying partner: His car, parked in the spot next to Sherman’s, was a late-model Mercedes roadster with the license plate APO KAY. His old workspace had also been next to Sherman’s, separated by an anteroom containing a lab bench that Sherman used to experiment with formulations. The men sometimes communicated by yelling across the space, and after hours they would sit together for friendly debates, often about religion. Kay shared Sherman’s atheism but didn’t think his friend needed to be so strident about it.
Kay had been in New York to see Andrea Bocelli perform at the time the Shermans were killed. He was still stunned, reduced to open-ended speculation about what had happened. “I knew 99 percent of what Barry was engaged in, and none of it makes any sense,” he said. “What did they do, either Barry or Honey or together, that enraged someone to do what they did?” He wondered if there may have been “some commitment that he made that he didn’t live up to, because the person that he made the commitment to didn’t deliver on his side.” Perhaps, he continued, that person “might have made promises to someone else, and reacted in rage.”
I asked Kay if he thought he’d ever know the truth. “No,” he replied. “There’s only one possibility: that someone will be convicted of a crime in Toronto, and when it comes time for sentencing will say, ‘I have information.’ That’s the only hope. And I’ll probably be long dead when that happens.” Sometimes, Kay said, “I sit up and look at his picture, and my mind just goes blank.”
Kay and Sherman in 1999.
PHOTOGRAPHER: DAVID COOPER/TORONTO STAR/GETTY IMAGES
It hadn’t been easy for Kay to restore normalcy at Apotex, and not only because of Sherman’s death. Much of the
generics industry is in crisis, squeezed on one side by buyers’ demands for lower prices and on the other by hungry rivals, mostly from India, which are rapidly building market share. Sherman never took outside capital, and he owned more than 90 percent of Apotex’s shares—a holding that’s passed to his children, none of whom works in the business. Proud of his roots, he maintained far more of the company’s production in high-cost, high-wage Canada than less sentimental owners would have countenanced. More than half of what Apotex makes comes from in and around Toronto, one of North America’s
most expensive cities. Some is produced in a warren of factory spaces surrounding Apotex headquarters; more comes from an iceberg of beige concrete several miles west, which occupies most of a city block and churns out 9 billion pills a year.
For the moment, Kay told me, he was trying to fulfill Sherman’s legacy by “keeping the company moving forward until the beneficiaries decide what they want to do.” Many in the drug industry expect that decision will be to sell Apotex, whether to a competitor or a cost-cutting private equity buyer. The company is already shrinking its footprint, shedding assets and cutting off product lines. In mid-July it
sold its European generics business to India’s
Aurobindo Pharma Ltd., and it has hired consultants from
McKinsey & Co. to standardize its financial records and streamline operations.''
