Apo­tex founder and wife's death now sus­pect­ed homi­cide; Spec­trum CEO Ra­jesh Shrotriya fired

→ Bar­ry Sher­man, the founder of Cana­di­an phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­ny Apo­tex Inc., and his wife, Hon­ey, were found dead in their home Fri­day from what Toron­to’s homi­cide de­tec­tives are call­ing “lig­a­ture neck com­pres­sion” – a type of stran­gu­la­tion.  Sher­man found­ed the gener­ics com­pa­ny in 1974, and to­day it makes over 300 gener­ics, em­ploys 11,000 peo­ple world­wide and re­ports an­nu­al sales of over $1 bil­lion. Sher­man’s net worth was es­ti­mat­ed at $4.77 bil­lion by Cana­di­an Busi­ness. In re­cent years, Sher­man and his com­pa­ny has been at the cen­ter of le­gal dis­putes in the U.S. af­ter Apo­tex launched a cheap­er, gener­ic ver­sion of blood-thin­ning drug Plav­ix. As a re­sult, the com­pa­ny had to pay $440 mil­lion in dam­ages to Bris­tol-My­ers Squibb Co. and Sanofi in a patent-in­fringe­ment case. Al­though Toron­to law en­force­ment is look­ing in­to the deaths as po­ten­tial homi­cides, Sher­man’s fam­i­ly told the Wall Street Jour­nal they couldn’t be­lieve it to be true.

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