The Mouse that Roared
Maybe you remember the outrageous and wonderful movie with Peter Sellers playing all three main roles about the fictional European principality of Grand Fenwick. The idea was to declare war against the United States and then lose it to claim huge reparations. Funny. Very, very funny.
Ray Gilmartin could take the Sellers role in a reprise of the movie. Ray Gilmartin, should the name escape you, is the CEO of Merck. Merck as in Vioxx, Merck as in thousands (perhaps tens of thousands) of deaths from taking its now-withdrawn arthritis pain killer, Merck as in stock-dropping-like-a-stone.
The Merck Board of Directors in European-Principality-like wisdom has decided to reward its 230 most senior executives with a one-time payment of up to three times their annual salary and bonus. Executives who fiddled the drug safety tests so they could profit from Dorothy Hamill’s well known face touting their disastrous drug. Executives who ran the show since 1999, a period in which Merck’s stock took a 7…