Exponential Page 9

Chapter 5

  “I can’t believe it!’ moaned Howard ‘Jet’ Martin. “How could this be happening to us again?” Jet sat in a room full of corporate officers bemoaning the fact that another leak had occurred.

  “The last time, they knew – no, they published – our financial woes before we announced anything. Now this!” The room full of executives eyed each other suspiciously and tried to look indignantly at whatever they were looking at. In reality, each was a little scared. Not scared of Jet. Yes, he could be prickly at times and was known for spitting fire and getting results, but he was pretty level headed and fair overall. What was scary was the fact that there did appear to be a leak from somewhere within their ranks. Someone in this room that they thought they trusted was likely a traitor.

  “I want to know how this got out!” Jet demanded. He stared at the chief operations officer seemingly expecting her to answer. Jill Bennet was a trim and outwardly friendly executive. One of the prestigious class of women who had made it in corporate America. Public relations did fall under her responsibility and she was quite familiar with many of the industry press representatives.

  “I talked with several of my sources and the news apparently came from BioGen – again…” she trailed off.

  “Come on Jill! How could someone from BioGen know! Someone must be feeding them information. The kind of information they are getting is pretty high level stuff. That means that it must be stuff coming from this room. That means…” he paused as he looked around the room, “quite likely someone here is responsible.” Most of the others looked anywhere but at Jet. Most looked at the floor.

  Jet went on, “I understand… Perhaps you might have mentioned something to someone you thought you could trust. Maybe a buddy you were out golfing with. Maybe your wives – who knows. They tell somebody else, and Wham! It gets back to our competitor. But after the last time? I thought we were going to be tightlipped! No one would discuss any of this outside of this room except to each other! What’s going on?”

  There was an awkward pause where nobody said anything. “OK… Jill? I want to know who is feeding information to BioGen. Do whatever it takes: Squeeze some of your contacts – bribe them if you have to. Hire an investigator – I don’t care, just find out how this information is getting out. I can tell all of you now, somebody’s head is going to roll. We had an agenda to go over today, but in lieu of this most recent development, we instead need to concentrate our efforts in damage control. I want some ideas on how we can control this thing. We need to consider our options and re-assemble at 3:00 today.”

  There were a few looks of disappointment from several of group. Jet continued, “Steve, Molly, I know you had plans on flying back to Phoenix tonight, but you better plan on sticking around an extra night. I know you guys from Atlanta need to get back too, but it will have to wait. I need everybody here to help address this. I think you all know what you have to do, see everyone at 3:00.”

  Jet stood, collected some printouts he had brought with him and strode through the exit. Very shortly, the conversations began and grew in intensity until the sound from the room was a dull roar of heated conversation.

  The team of executives of Talicor argued and discussed their situation. Only three weeks ago, BioGen, a Talicor competitor in the multi billion dollar generic drug market, had somehow been responsible for publishing details of the financial situation of Talicor in a national trade journal. Details which turned out to be pretty accurate but were made worse by the negative spin inferred by the article.

  Now this report on details of Talicor’s business, including an announcement of its intention to shift some of its focus away from generic or “copy cat” drugs and to begin extending its new drug development by acquiring a small bio – engineering company that specialized in recombinant genetic techniques. This held out a lot of promise internally as a way to boost profits back to a respectable level appreciated by shareholders. The Generic drug industry was fiercely competitive. Typically the development cost of new drugs put even more drain on any potential profits, so companies like Talicor and BioGen stayed away from new drugs and focused themselves on high volume generics. The report was again written with a negative spin. It likened the merger to a potato chip producer trying to buy its way into the fine wine market. Overall, it made Talicor look cheap and, in contrast, praised some of the recent similar efforts by BioGen.

  What was really upsetting is that someone, no doubt, was benefiting immensely from this. Talicor’s stock took another beating in the market. Their competitors, most notably BioGen, were doing much better. Aparently certain shareholders of certain stocks would benefit, but even more so the person who was leaking the information was quite likely profiting. Either from direct bribes or by having money in the right place at the right time. Actually, it was rather amazing how much money a little tidbit of information such as this could be worth to the right person…