The board majority at Seattle biotechnology company Acucela was voted out Friday and replaced by a slate supporting founder Ryo Kubota, who was promptly restored to the CEO post he’d lost in December.
The board majority at Seattle biotechnology company Acucela was voted out Friday and replaced by a slate supporting founder Ryo Kubota, who was promptly restored to the CEO post he’d lost in December.
The outcome had been a foregone conclusion since March, when a court ordered the special shareholder meeting. Kubota is the largest single shareholder, and with a proxy from Japanese investment firm SBI Holdings he controlled more than 50 percent of the vote.
Former lead director Glen Sato, now ousted, said in a March press release that the board removed Kubota because he “was unable to transition from founding visionary to public company CEO” and had a “poor relationship” with Japanese pharmaceutical giant Otsuka, Acucela’s key industry partner. Reinstating Kubota as CEO “after his failure in that role once already” would damage the company, Sato declared.
But hours after the Friday morning shareholder vote replacing the four directors who sat on the board alongside Kubota, Kubota was back in. Brian O’Callaghan, elevated to CEO in December, was out.
Most Read Business Stories
“Dr. Kubota is not only the scientific and financial visionary who founded Acucela. We believe he will best maximize the value of the company for all stakeholders,” said Yoshitaka Kitao, a new Acucela board member and the CEO of SBI Holdings, in a statement announcing the changes.
The struggle for control has roiled the company since last year, but Acucela has other challenges as well.
Its shares have lost two thirds of their value since it went public on the Tokyo stock exchange in February 2014. Not long before that IPO, it cut 35 percent of its work force after Otsuka dropped co-development of one drug candidate when its Phase III clinical trial results proved disappointing.
The company said in March it might “suffer destabilizing management retention issues” if Kubota was reinstated. This week it reported that its head of biology would resign Friday and that efforts to hire a chief scientific officer had been hampered by the board turmoil.
Friday’s announcement said the company had named three new top management executives to work with Kubota.