Spanish pharmaceutical company Grifols will hire independent directors, president told the newspaper

MADRID (Reuters) – Spanish pharmaceutical company Grifols, which faces a drop in its share price this year, plans to add independent directors to its audit and remuneration committees to improve its governance, its chairman said in a newspaper interview published on Sunday.

Grifols’ market value has fallen billions of euros since Gotham City Research released three reports in early January accusing the company of overstating profits and understating debt. Grifols has repeatedly denied the allegations.

In a joint interview with CEO Nacho Abia in Barcelona-based newspaper La Vanguardia – the first since the start of the crisis – chairman Thomas Glanzmann said the appointment of independent directors to the audit and compensation committees would allow the company to “continue to improve its governance”. “.

Abia said Grifols also needed to simplify the way it explained itself to the market.

“We must work to reduce this complexity and increase the clarity of our explanations to the market, which is what allowed the Gotham report to raise these concerns,” he told the newspaper.

Grifols said on April 10 that it plans to meet its debt repayments in 2025 with proceeds from new senior secured notes and the sale of its 20% stake in Shanghai RAAS to Haier Group.

Glanzmann said there will be strong demand for the company’s bonds when the issuance is completed in a week or two.

“The number of institutional investors who contacted us to participate has been extraordinary and says a lot about the market’s confidence in the company’s future, in our growth and in our ability to repay the debt”, he stated.

Grifols wants to eventually buy back blood donation company Haema AG and plasma donation company BPC Plasma, Abia said, having sold both to Scranton Enterprises, an investment vehicle linked to the founding Grifols family, in 2018.

“We have an option, very generous for Grifols, to buy these companies and we will exercise it. But (there is) no rush,” Abia said.

In its January report, Gotham City said that both Grifols and Scranton have fully consolidated Haema and BPC Plasma into their accounts. Grifols said it is obliged to do so because it has a purchase option.

(Reporting by Graham Keeley and Joan Faus; Editing by Jan Harvey)