Barr Pharmaceuticals

"Later that year, in August, I met Steve again. I had just taken Actavis private in a €5.3 billion deal that Deutsche Bank was rolling €4 billion into. This deal could so easily have plunged Germany’s biggest bank into serious financial difficulties. I had built Actavis into one of the world’s biggest generic pharmaceutical companies in a competitive and consolidating industry. As industry consolidation quickened after 2006, I felt we had to decide quickly whether we were going to become predator or prey. Both could have worked, but we decided that because of the state of the lending markets we were going to become predators, leveraging up Actavis and buying other companies. We bid for a Croatian generics company, Pliva, which ended up being bought by a US company, Barr Pharmaceuticals, and went a long way down the line to try to buy the generics division of Germany’s Merck. Bankers fell over themselves to provide debt and convince us to bid and, although we ended up backing away from the price being asked, we had credit lines of €3.4 billion–€4 billion committed on a potential deal. This opened my eyes to the amounts that banks were willing to lend on such deals, so I decided to use that arsenal of debt to buy the 60 per cent of Actavis that I did not already own."

"For example, Actavis made a hostile bid for Pliva, a large international pharmaceuticals company based in Croatia, in 2006. The chief executive didn’t want our takeover and got a US drugs group, Barr Pharmaceuticals, to counter-bid for it as a ‘white knight’. Soon it became clear that the public relations strategy was to focus on my time in Russia, with Barr hiring Kroll, an investigations agency, to help it in a PR battle."