SARISSA CAPITAL HAS COMMENCED THE PROCESS TO CALL
A SPECIAL MEETING OF AMARIN SHAREHOLDERS TO REMOVE AND REPLACE
CERTAIN BOARD MEMBERS
Sarissa believes Amarin risks destroying
additional shareholder value unless Sarissa representatives are
immediately added to the board
Amarin board’s governance process lacks urgency
and disregards shareholder vote at annual meeting
Greenwich, CT, October 11, 2022 – Sarissa Capital Management
LP (“Sarissa”) today made the following statement regarding its
ongoing discussions with Amarin Corporation plc (NASDAQ: AMRN)
regarding board representation:
Amarin’s board seems to be trying to outdo the misguided leadership
of the Roman Emperor Nero who played his lyre while Rome was
engulfed in flames. Their “imperial” attitude and inaction is the
problem. We, along with all shareholders, must try to fix the
company.
This year alone, Amarin shareholders have lost over
$850 million as the stock has fallen 64% year to date.* Since
the annual meeting, at which we believe shareholders loudly voiced
their concerns with leadership and the direction of the company,
Amarin’s stock has fallen 38% and shareholders have lost over
$280 million.†
Notably, at the annual meeting, nearly half of votes by
shareholders for directors up for re-election this year, which included
those in leadership roles, were “against” or “abstentions.”
Sarissa, the largest shareholder of Amarin and a sophisticated
institutional investor with a long history of shareholder value
creation in healthcare companies, wants to help restore lost value
and guide the company through this critical period. We fear that
the continued mismanagement of the business will result in further
permanent destruction of shareholder value. We believe Amarin’s
current trajectory risks the company running out of cash and will
result in the need to raise capital at a terrible valuation,
severely diluting existing shareholders and further destroying
shareholder value.
As we have heard from many shareholders, Amarin appears to not
share our collective sense of urgency. Sarissa has discussed with
the company adding shareholder representatives to the board for
many months, but the board appears to be running a dawdling process
that seems to ignore the critical period facing the company. Even
after the clear and loud vote by shareholders in June, the
directors on Amarin’s board took more than twelve weeks to
interview Sarissa board candidates, seemingly unable to prioritize
the company over their summer schedules while destroying further
shareholder value. The drawn-out process appears to us to
embody the company’s lackadaisical and reactive management of
shareholder capital.
We cannot stand idly by as the board and management continue to
risk destroying further shareholder value and potentially make the
business increasingly unsalvageable. Sarissa has a history of
helping struggling healthcare companies, including in the
cardiovascular space, such as The Medicines Company. In order to
turn the company around, we believe Sarissa representatives must be
added to the board immediately. Although we will continue our
discussions with the company, we have commenced the process to call
a special meeting of shareholders to remove and replace certain
Amarin directors who we believe do not serve the interest of
shareholders. We hope that this process will ultimately be
unnecessary and that the board will act swiftly to appoint our
representatives to the board. However, given how reactive and drawn
out the board process has been to date, we have little optimism
that the board will now act with necessary and sufficient
urgency.
| * |
Calculated from end of day 12/31/2021 to 10/10/2022.
Source: Bloomberg
|
| † |
Calculated from end of day 6/27/2021 to 10/10/2022.
Source: Bloomberg
|