The blood products manufacturer Grifols has announced to the CNMV the departure of the members of the founding family from all executive positions in the company and the appointment of a new CEO, Nacho Abia, under the orders of the executive president, Thomas Glanzmann.
The note indicates that Raimon Grifols and Victor Grifols Deu have decided to voluntarily separate themselves from management, and leave their functions as corporate director and director of operations, and will continue in the group as proprietary directors (representing a shareholder group).
According to the company, the separation between ownership and management was planned before the report by the vulture fund Gotham City Research, which pointed out that there could be irregularities in the pharmaceutical company's relations with one of the companies owned by the family, Scranton, and culminates the path of separation of professionalization of the board that led to the appointment of an external president two years ago.
A telecommunications engineer by training, Abia has 25 years of international management experience, most of it at Olympus, where he was CEO and global head of strategy. Olympus is a Japanese firm specialized in medical technology, a world leader in diagnosis and minimally invasive treatments, with 33,000 employees.
Abia will be appointed to the board on February 26 and will assume his responsibilities as CEO on April 1. The transition in executive responsibilities, states the communication to the CNMV, “will be carried out in an orderly manner to guarantee an adequate transfer of knowledge, organizational adaptation and fluid continuity without impact on operations.”
The professionalization of management, the note points out, has been designed in recent months, and accelerated when Thomas Glanzmann assumed the executive presidency last year. One of his milestones was the withdrawal from the board of directors of Víctor Grifols Roura, the promoter of the group's internationalization, who was replaced by Albert Grifols Coma-Cros in December. That same month, Abia's hiring was closed, according to sources close to the company, after a selection process that began in the summer.
The new CEO, the note states, “will focus on enhancing Grifols' current growth strategy, promoting operational excellence and continuing to execute the deleveraging plan.”
The high level of debt, along with the need to improve governance, have been precisely the two factors that have hindered the evolution of Grifols on the stock market in recent months, where it has accumulated a drop of more than 30% since the Gotham attack. .
