You're listening to Taking Stock with Kathleen Hayes and Pim Fox on Bloomberg Radio. Breaking news from a Latin America, Columbia's Central Bank, Columbia, I should say, raising their lending rate to seven percent from six and a half percent. That's a fifty basis point move, much more than analysts have been forecasting. As inflation surges to its highest level since two thousand one after the worst drought in decades. A big story will be covering in the three o'clock
Wall Street Time hour of Taking Stock. Now, let's get to another very big story today. Valiant Pharmaceuticals attempting to put the worst of its problems behind it today announcing a shake up of its board and filling along awaited annual report where it excuse me, filing along awaited annual report where it promised significant changes to its strategy and better oversight of its executives. This Credoholo joins US now specialty Pharma and Biotech analyst for Bloomberg Intelligence. So, Liz,
a big move from Valiant. Yeah, I would say that, you know, the company had been saying April nine, where we are going to file by them, even though they had much more of a cushion with their lenders, so in terms of keeping its integrity, which is already completely battered at this point, they really needed to file by today, So meeting that deadline was certainly a positive. I think that the company is very focused on the fact that they have new management in place. Now. We have Joe
Papo joining from Parago. He's slated to begin his reign in May. And with the new board shake up, you know, they're kind of saying we are an entirely new company. Any update on the investigation that is ongoing by the SEC. Yeah, so that is still ongoing. We saw the Senate price probe earlier this week as well, and in that discussion Bill Ackman essentially said, I'm going to go back to the board. We're going to discuss slashing the price of
some of these drugs that we've increased. He suggested perhaps a thirty percent cut across the board. But again, I mean this is on products that have gone up five so at that point, what's giving it back not really all that great. That's what would you say. The biggest challenge is for this this new management team. One, I think they need to get investors back on their side. There are certainly people who have been burned by this company,
yet there are still many that are loyal. But they still need to convince them that they're capable of turning the ship around. But I think one of the bigger things is really going to be returning to the growth levels that they had seen. I mean, that was what had attracted investors to begin with. They were this m and A powerhouse picking up assets that were, you know, they claimed undervalued, but essentially they increased the price to
drive sales. I don't think we'll see that same level of growth that investors are used to, so they need to convince them that this new model is something that's still attractive. It's not going to be the same as one Investors had initially gone after borrow money, spend the money on other pharmaceutic golden drug companies, lay people off for cut costs, increased the price of drugs. That was kind of the business models that accurate absolutely. I mean,
that's that's the harsh reality of it. How do you do a one eight on that now, while at the same time throwing X executives under the bus. And I'm thinking of Howard Schiller and Tanya Carol. Right, these are Howard Schiller was the former CFO and uh Tanya carrout of former corporate controller. Yeah, and Schiller took the rain when Pearson went into the hospital, so you know, he's he's been around, he's been there when the company needed him, and now he's you know, the scapegoat on pretty much
all things. I think the difficulty will be that most of their products, when you look at them, they're not like the traditional blockbuster that you might think of. So one of their leading drugs that they recently acquired from salex for it's called FAS and it's for IBS, essentially brought in two fifty million dollars last year. That's not you know, the kind of products that we're seeing out of someone like Fiser, who's key product is something like
seven billion dollars. These are it's a collection of very small products. I just wanted to say, and I'll take responsibility for it. I b S is irritable bows syndrome. That's correct. Maybe they would have a little bit of that at all. Right, thank you very much. Liz grud A Hollow, a specialty format and biotechnology analyst for Bloomberg Intelligence of course, Bloomberg Intelligence, providing unique real time researching context on a variety of industries, all markets, and business
factors that affect the business terminal. Customers can access this function by just typing B I go on the Bloomberg