The Grifols family resigns from the company’s management and appoints a new CEO
The controversy sparked by US investment firm Gotham City’s scathing report on Grifols is beginning to have repercussions on the company’s organizational structure. The company announced that Raymond Grifols and Victor Grifols Deu will retire from their executive roles and will remain directors in their own right. The board of directors will appoint Nacho Abia as the new CEO, while Thomas Glanzmann will remain as executive president. The company announced the changes in a statement to CNMV.
In its statement, the company assures that “these changes are part of a long-planned and carefully developed strategy for the development of corporate governance of Grifols, which Raymond Grifols and Victor Grifols Deu initiated in 2022 together with the Board of Directors in order to gradually divide the ownership of Grifols.” Company management.”
With a large presence in the US, the group is a giant with over 22,000 employees and revenue of over 6,000 million in 2022. A leader in the blood products sector, it was founded in 1909 and has undergone several changes in recent years. in his leadership. . This is another aspect that Gotham, which says it began investigating the Grifols last spring, is questioning: there has been a real generational change.
The bearish firm noted that Grifols CEO Thomas Glanzmann, appointed in February 2023, “is a welcome change of direction, but he had been with Grifols since 2006 and was on the board of directors at the time of the suspicious transactions we described in our report.” We find it very contradictory and grifolian in everything except its name.”
On December 19, the former president of the multinational corporation, Victor Grifols Roura, the grandson of the founder and the architect of the company’s transformation into a leading giant in the plasma industry, resigned from his position on the board of directors, which he had held for 40 years. . years.
The new CEO “will be appointed to the board of directors on February 26 (by agreement, filling an existing vacancy) and will begin serving as CEO on April 1, with a focus on enhancing Grifols’ ongoing growth strategy and operational efficiencies.” and continue to implement Grifols’ deleveraging plan.
The Catalan multinational has been saddled with debt for some time, especially in the last two years, more than $9.5 billion at the end of the third quarter of 2023, due to its aggressive acquisition policy. Especially since the start of the pandemic. The group, which plans to report 2023 results in February, posted a net profit of $3.3 million in the year to September last year, compared with a loss of $56 million at the end of the first half, after revenue rose 11.7% to 4,882 million.
Nacho Abia is a “senior executive with 25 years of international management experience in public life sciences and medical technology companies. He will begin his duties on April 1, 2024. His most recent role was as CEO and Chief Global Strategy Officer of Olympus Corporation. , a Japanese medical technology company based in Tokyo, a global leader in diagnostics and minimally invasive treatment, with 33,000 employees, included in the Nikkei index,” the company explains in a related fact sheet.