upheaval, page-9

In hindsight, thinking about all the actions taken by this company over the past x years, I cannot think of one that has ultimately played out in a positive way. Instead, a littany of missed opportunity/bungling.

- stuffed up Biota/GSK Relenza Marketing settlement. In the end, accepted $20m (covering half the legal costs) instead of earlier accepting $75m and full costs, a difference of approx $95m.

- missed opportunity to "sell" LANI partnership during H1N1 pandemic - cost? We'll never know the value of offers they knocked back.

- missed opportunity to take LANI forward to overlap Relenza patent expiry.

- Failure to move forward on VAP for a number of years and eventually moving forward on narrow acute target group. We'll never know whether any partner offers have come and gone over the years.

- blame the Australian market for not understanding the Biota opportunity.

- Failure to secure and sort out a license deal with DS on ROW LANI sales (now, DS can hold off, or negotiate from a position of strength)

- Moving to the US to be alongside their partner (BARDA). The NABI deal. Wooing and paying a Rockstar duo to take us forward...pulling up stumps and moving to Atlanta to Russ' hometown (part of the deal)

- BARDA pulling out.

And during this whole time, through the littany of missed opportunities, we had management pushing their chests out claiming how good they had been and blaming external factors for their own bungles/inaction.

What have I missed?

By the way, have we heard from our illustrious Chairman, Jim Fox, who, along with his deputy, Peter Cook, dragged us through the quagmire and convinced us to relocate at great cost to be where it counted, the holy grail - the US of A.

I vote we sack most of our staff apart from those directly required to keep LANI and VAP dripfed while looking for someone to offload them to (for maybe $30m), sack our management and all Directors, appoint a couple of Portfolio Managers and invest our cash (maybe $100m if we manage to offload LANI and VAP) on a couple of commercial properties and live on the returns, together with what we get from DS on Inavir.