Mark Mobius, chairman of Templeton Asset Management Ltd., backed Sun Pharmaceuticals Ltd.’s year- long bid to buy Israeli drugmaker Taro Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd., saying he wants the deal completed “as fast as possible.”
Taro sued the Indian drugmaker for failing to disclose key information in its offer. Buying Taro would help Mumbai-based Sun expand its market reach in the U.S., where demand for generics will grow as health-care costs surge and more blockbuster drugs lose patent protection.
Templeton owns 10 percent of Taro, located 30 kilometers (19 miles) from Tel Aviv. Mobius said he wants Sun to take over the Israeli company to improve disclosure of Taro’s accounts.
“There have been no audited accounts from the Taro management and they recently wanted to have a shareholders’ meeting to approve dispensation of the directors for responsibility for the accounts,” Mobius said in a Bloomberg Television interview. “That’s alarming so we said we wanted to back Sun to take over this company as fast as possible so that we could see those accounts.”
Roanne Kulakoff, a spokeswoman for Taro, couldn’t immediately be contacted in New York, where her voice mail said she is out of the office until Dec. 3.
Sun, India’s largest drugmaker by market value, fell 0.4 percent to 1,533 rupees as of 11:56 a.m. after surging as much as 6.4 percent.
“Although the news that the third-largest shareholder is now backing Sun’s bid to take control of Taro is positive, it has no implications for the outstanding legal dispute,” Abhishek Singhal, an analyst at Macquarie Group, wrote in a note to clients today. “A positive court ruling is essential for Sun to take eventual control.”
Source: Bloomberg.com
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