© Reuters. FILE PHOTO: Bayer AG CEO Werner Baumann addresses the German drugmaker’s annual results news conference in Leverkusen, Germany, February 27, 2020. REUTERS/Wolfgang Rattay/File Photo
FRANKFURT (Reuters) – Bayer (OTC:) investor Deka has called for CEO Werner Baumann to be replaced ahead of his planned departure, increasing pressure on the German drugmaker.
“Bayer needs a new strategic positioning, which cannot be credibly achieved with Werner Baumann,” Ingo Speich, Deka’s head of sustainability and corporate governance, told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (FAS) newspaper in remarks published on Saturday.
The mutual fund firm is among Bayer’s 20 largest shareholders.
“There is a window of opportunity for Chairman Norbert Winkeljohann to act before the annual general meeting at the end of April. He has to seize that opportunity, otherwise the pressure on him will also increase,” Speich added.
He said a successor would have to come from outside the company.
“Generally speaking, we are always open to a constructive dialogue with our stakeholders,” a Bayer spokesman said, declining to comment specifically on the interview.
Despite recent improvements in the company’s agricultural business and drug development prospects, Bayer’s shares have been hit by litigation over the glyphosate-based herbicide Roundup and environmental contamination related to chemicals known as PCBs.
Legal claims are issues inherited from your acquisition of Monsanto (NYSE:) for more than $60 billion in 2018.
Baumann, who engineered the troubled Monsanto deal, was given a new contract in 2020 that runs through 2024 and said at the time that he would leave the company when that term expired.
A week ago, mutual fund group Union Investment criticized the Bayer chairman for a lack of commitment, such as exploring a spin-off of the company’s consumer health division.
Bayer is also facing demands from activist investor Bluebell Capital Partners to break up the company, including the sale of its consumer health unit and then the separation of its pharmaceutical and agricultural businesses.
Another activist investment fund, hedge fund veteran Jeffrey Ubben’s Inclusive Capital Partners, said this month it had also acquired a stake in Bayer.
