Maybe he can buy Serono back from the Germans! ZURICH (Reuters) - Swiss billionaire Ernesto Bertarelli has bought back the Geneva headquarters of his former biotech firm Serono, hoping to establish a biotech research campus. After selling the family business to German drugmaker Merck KGaA for $13.3 billion in 2006, the Harvard Business School graduate went on to win the America's Cup sailing prize for the second time. He and his former beauty queen wife Kirsty cut a high profile among the Swiss jet-set. To buy back the site, Bertarelli formed a company called Campus Biotech with fellow Swiss billionaire Hansjoerg Wyss, who made part of his fortune by selling Synthes, a maker of artificial joints, to Johnson & Johnson in 2011 for over $21 billion. Since selling Serono, Bertarelli, Switzerland's sixth richest man, has founded investment fund Ares Life Sciences which has stakes in medtech, pharmaceutical and diagnostic imaging companies. Last year he bemoaned Merck's decision to move Merck Serono's HQ to the German city of Darmstadt, affecting 1,250 jobs, saying that a large part of Serono's history had been written in Geneva. Switzerland has a reputation as a hub for biotech research and is home to nearly 250 biotech companies, employing more than 19,000 people. The pharmaceutical industry accounts for 4 percent of economic output. Details of the transaction were not disclosed. Merck said the property will be handed over on June 28. The Technical University in Lausanne (EPFL) and Geneva University are closely involved in the project and will use part of the site as a research center. Under the project, the Wyss Foundation will give the EPFL 100 million Swiss francs ($103 million) to convert part of the site into a bio- and neuroengineering center known as the "Wyss Institute". The consortium hopes to attract start-up companies to the remainder of the site.
He is a POS and I hope he falls overboard. I can still see him standing in front of everyone, saying "I would never sell this company, no matter what you hear....!" Of course we never saw him again. He never gave a damn about the company like his father did - all he cared about was how much cash he could get out of it.
Ernesto is a great man who has built companies and fortunes for thousands of people. you are crazy. i'd work for him in second and so would anyone in the fertility business where this company was built and its brains remain. Go Ernesto!
I was an original MS rep and I would work for him anytime. I would never work for EMD Serono again because it is a poor company.
Yeah read up on the guy he is partnering with. Because of his heavy handedness three of his execs went to prison. What a pair.
WHAT? He was an absentee CEO who was often mocked in the financial press for being an Mia playboy who put his unqualified friends in positions they had no business being in.
Who would mock a billionaire for chasing girls and partying while ditching work while employing his cronies? Tony Stark is my idol but Ernesto is a close second!
People who are investing in his company...He was a f'ing joke silver spoon guy whose daddy bought is way into Harvard and Babson. You must be new here...
No, I'm not new. But most of these Ivy League clowns have families that paid their way through life while feeding them off of a silver spoon.
Ok. So let's not say Ernie 'built' something. He inherited something, ran it poorly and pressured by institutional investors was forced to take a sabbatical during is racing days and then was heavily pressured to sell. I have no problem with that but let's stop with the EB was a great leader who built something nonsense.
