Examination of Witness (Questions 400
- 419)
TUESDAY 28 JULY 1998
DR PETER
LEWIS
400. So that was the nature of the misdemeanour,
if misdemeanour it was, that Dr Millar had committed, that he
had risked aborting the whole trial in the eyes of the FDA?
(Dr Lewis) Certainly, and I just could not believe
he had done it to be honest. That was why I wrote in that letter
to Andy I really did not believe he had done it, I thought there
had been a mistake and it was a misunderstanding. It was only
when the company circular came out when they actually documented
they had followed this up and had an audit and what not that I
had to accept he actually had done it.
401. Following up Dr Jones' question, it cannot
have been so exceptional to do this because the FDA did give him
permission at one point and then the law refused him permission
to use it.
(Dr Lewis) Well, I do not know what that FDA thing
was. I have read that. I do not know any details about it. I think
he went to the FDA much later, long after I had left the company,
and sort of retrospectively asked for permission to unblind the
study and I do not know what the FDA said. I am very surprised
that they said, "Well, that's fine". Normally they do
not do that. However, it must be said that if you want to unblind
a study for reasons other than the ones that are in the protocol,
safety and so on, the only way to do that would be to go to the
competent regulatory authority and ask them for permission to
do it.
Dr Turner
402. You clearly had a great difference of opinion
with Dr McCullagh over the strategy the company should be following.
(Dr Lewis) Yes.
403. When did that really begin to emerge and
to what extent was it a question of your assessment of the commercial
possibilities, prospects of the trials on the products that were
in process versus the expectations of Dr McCullagh?
(Dr Lewis) Well, as far as the timing was concerned,
I always felt that he was rather optimistic and gung-ho on everything,
but I accepted that because he was an optimistic sort of chap.
When we really began to fall out about these matters of strategy
was really immediately after the rights issue which was in June
or July of 1996. Both the Finance Director and I, who saw eye
to eye on these matters, felt that once he had got the money in,
he was now going to an expansionary phase and there was no holding
him, and that in fact proved to be the case, I think. He became
much more expansionary and he determined that he would hire a
lot of people for the commercial side, for example, and that was
the one thing I put my finger on, that he went out and he hired
a director of commercialisation and that person hired more people
and we were spending a lot of money on commercialisation and that
was really the thing when I finally said, "That's it. I don't
want to go on with this".
404. Did this come back on you as pressure to
stretch the results of trials beyond what they would actually
substantiate?
(Dr Lewis) No, it was not quite like that. I felt
under terrific pressure because I knew that the results of the
trials were what was driving us and had to pay for all this and
if any of the trials were late or they did not work, then it was
a disaster waiting to happen. I really felt it was unnecessary
to do all this, and I would have preferred some more conservative
measures, licensing out the first products, doing some more alliances,
potentially not buying all our own commercial people, but merging
with a company that perhaps had a few products and which had a
commercial network and so on. I have to say that Dr McCullagh's
policy, he made it crystal clear to all the investors and everybody
else that that was what he wanted to do, and I just felt that
it was over-ambitious, but he convinced everybody else that it
was right, he convinced the Board that it was right, and I felt,
"Well, the guy is the founder. He may be right. I just don't
feel happy with it", so I started to disengage myself and
said I wanted to leave.
405. He was clearly counting on something approaching
100 per cent chance of success, whereas you were not?
(Dr Lewis) Well, quite. We had had six compounds going
to the clinic already. Four of them had failed and two of them
were still ongoing and yet he still felt that there was going
to be 100 per cent success on the other two. Well, probability
theory is not like that.
406. Whereas your assessment would have been
of the order of what?
(Dr Lewis) Well, I thought differently about the two
different compounds. I thought Marimastat was going to be a winner
and I still do actually. I think it is probably going to be a
long haul because it is such a revolutionary type of compound,
but that is a real gem, but, and I think Andy said something like
this, it needs a lot of time and money to get a compound like
that through, but I thought it is just the sort of thing that
you need a partner for. In fact they were knocking on our door.
My former company, or I should not say this, but another major
pharma company was calling me quite frequently saying that this
is just the sort of compound they would like to get involved with,
and at one point we had another partnership lined up for a very,
very large sum of money to partner Marimastat and he just would
not countenance it. He said that it was giving away the upside
of the company. Well, I saw it the other way around and I thought
it was reducing the risk of the company.
Dr Gibson
407. Why did you write this supportive letter?
What guided you to do that?
(Dr Lewis) Well, it was a very foolish thing to do
in retrospect—
408. Why do you say "foolish"?
(Dr Lewis) I felt and I have been told it was very
foolish and I felt foolish when it was given to The Times and
published and that it made me look extremely foolish. Why I wrote
it was that I heard that Andy was going through a rough time and
that the company was being very tough on him and they had thrown
him out without any compensation. I read his letter in the Financial
Times in which he attacked the sort of policies of the company
which was this strategy issue about hiring commercial people too
early and so on, and I thoroughly agreed with that and I felt
that that was just right. Then I sat down and I watched him on
TV on The Money Programme and he looked absolutely awful, he was
haggard and he looked like he had lost about two stones in weight,
and I just felt sympathy for him. I thought, "Well, it's
a bit rotten that I left the company over these issues and I am
not saying anything about it", so I wrote a hand-written
letter quite quickly and I sent it off. As I put it in the letter
box, I thought, "Is this the right thing to do?" but
I thought, "Well, I've known the guy for years. It'll be
fine. He'll probably call me and we'll have a chat about this".
That did not happen and I read the newspaper and the excerpts
of my letter in The Times a couple of days later.
409. Did you express this view to anybody else
in the company that you were—mind you, you were still part
of the company at the time, so it did not prejudice your chances
of getting a settlement with the company?
(Dr Lewis) Well, this was ongoing. I wrote this letter
when I was already very much a part-time consultant to British
Biotech and, as I say, I regarded that purely as a way of receiving
in settlement the sum that I was due, but I did not discuss this
letter with anybody before I sent it, no, I just sent it off.
Chairman
410. So although you might have thought that
it was a foolish letter to send with hindsight because it has
been made public, the fact remains that at the time you wrote
it, you certainly thought that Dr Millar had some justice for
saying the things he was saying.
(Dr Lewis) Yes, I did.
Dr Jones
411. Why did you say, "I got you into this
and I feel responsible for some of it"? What did you mean
by that?
(Dr Lewis) Well, I meant that I had always been his
mentor and I persuaded him to join British Biotech in the first
place and in fact on a couple of occasions he resigned because
he did not like things about the company and I kept him on and
said, "Look, it's going to be fine. You are doing a good
job", so I felt that I had kept him there for longer than
he probably should have been there and that was really the reason.
Dr Turner
412. How do you respond to Dr Millar's suggestion
that you acted treacherously and that you are denying knowledge
of his actions because of your own share dealings in April 1997?
(Dr Lewis) Well, I was very hurt when I heard him
say that. I saw him on the video saying it and I just felt that
that was just awful. I felt awful about it. He also said that
he did not like me. This is a guy I have known for 15 years and
I got him two jobs at least and I thought I was on very good terms
with him. I thought he was headstrong and difficult, but I simply
did not bear him any malice and I was very upset when he said
those things about me.
Chairman
413. Staying on that very point that Dr Turner
has just asked you, we have thought on this Committee that it
is always possible that if there are people who are less careful
than we expect them to be, there could be a conflict between money
and drug trial results. Now, Dr Turner has just asked you about
Dr Millar's suggestion that you acted treacherously in denying
that there was anything wrong with the trials so that the share
price held up, and held up at about £2.80 instead of crashing
to 30 pence as it did later. Do you think it is possible that
people could come up rather optimistically with trial results
to help the shares that they are holding in very large number
in their own portfolio?
(Dr Lewis) I think it is possible. I do not think
it happened on this particular occasion. It certainly was not
my motivation, Chairman. Obviously that is possible, but to go
back to what actually happened around that period of time, there
actually was not any bad news around. We were in purdah, as it
were, and there was nothing going on. There were a couple of large
clinical trials going on which had been blinded, but we were in
a period in the beginning part of 1997 when there were not any
clinical results. We had just submitted the Zacutex marketing
authorisation and there was not an awful lot going on as far as
results of clinical trials were concerned. There was a big clinical
trial going on but there were not any results coming out.
414. Neither good nor bad at that time?
(Dr Lewis) No, there was nothing happening. That was
part of our problem, we had nothing to talk to the analysts about,
it was just ongoing.
Mr Beard
415. Dr Lewis, could I take you back to your
letter to Dr Millar of 17 May in which you say: "When I finally
realised that Keith" that is Dr McCullagh, "was not
going to accept any soft landing by merging the company or out-licensing
products to lay off the risks then I knew I had to leave. The
central problem at British Biotech is Keith's ridiculous arrogant
optimism". Do you still stand by those words?
(Dr Lewis) Yes.
Mr Jones
416. I wanted to pursue what are your relations
with Dr Millar now after what you have been through? You have
employed him twice, would you employ him again?
(Dr Lewis) Certainly not. I think he has behaved despicably.
What he did with my letter was pretty awful. He sat here and said
he did not like me and I had done wrong, which I utterly reject.
I think he has become obsessed with a sort of vendetta. A lot
of the things he said in terms of strategy I agreed with and that
was why I wrote the letter, but when he went into all these individual
accusations about share sales and the Batimastat matter and so
on and so forth, I totally part company with him. As I said in
my submission I pretty largely agreed with everything that was
in British Biotech's circular to shareholders[1]
on these matters.
Dr Williams
417. I put a completely different construction
on things and there are four or five things I would like to put
to you. The first is in terms of your working relationship with
Dr Millar you were his immediate superior, his boss?
(Dr Lewis) Yes.
418. So you were seeing him every week, maybe
even every day?
(Dr Lewis) Yes.
419. From November 1996 to May 1997, the last
six months of your employment, he was unblinding these trials?
(Dr Lewis) Yes, so it appears.
1 Not printed. Back
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