Shareholders overwhelmingly approve Biogen board
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Biogen Idec Inc (BIIB.O) shareholders elected the company's four-member slate of nominees to its board of directors, handily beating those proposed by billionaire investor Carl Icahn, Biogen said on Wednesday.
The nominees for the biotech's board included: Cecil Pickett, its president of research and development; Lynn Schenk, an attorney; and Phillip Sharp, a Nobel Prize winner who helped found Biogen 30 years ago.
It also nominated Stelios Papadopoulos, a retired vice chairman of Cowen & Co, to replace Thomas Keller, who is retiring.
Sharp received 98 percent of votes cast, and each of the other nominees received nearly 75 percent of votes.
By contrast, each of the three nominees proposed by Icahn, received less than 25 percent of votes. Icahn's proposal to amend Biogen's bylaws to limit the board's size to 12 members was rejected by nearly 75 percent of shareholders.
Icahn and Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Biogen, with a market cap of $18.4 billion, have been locked in a proxy battle for months. Icahn Associates Corp, has a 4.28 percent stake in Biogen. It sought to revive a failed attempt by Biogen to sell itself.
Icahn accused Biogen of deliberately sabotaging the sales process by not allowing potential buyers to talk to its partners, Irish firm Elan Corp (ELN.I) and biotechnology company Genentech Inc DNA.N.
Biogen, which sells multiple sclerosis drugs Avonex and Tysabri and the cancer drug Rituxan, denied the accusation.
(Reporting by Deepa Seetharaman, editing by Leslie Gevirtz)
