The replied to post contains my old sticky on this scam...
The racket is still the same...
GPC Biotech AG
GPC Biotech logo orange.png
Type Public
Founded August 1997
Location Martinsried, Germany
Key people Bernd R. Seizinger, M.D., Ph. D. (CEO)
Mirko Scherer, Ph. D. (CFO)
Industry Biotechnology
Products 3 in Clinical or Pre-clinical development
Revenue €12,649 (2004)
Website www.gpc-biotech.com/
GPC Biotech (also referred to as GPCbiotech and GPC-Biotech) was a German biopharmaceutical company. The company's mission statement reads "... to discover, develop and commercialize new anticancer drugs."[1]
Founded in 1997, the company was held privately until May 2000 when an initial public offering was made on the now defunct German Neuer Markt. Subsequent to the closing of the Neuer, GPC refinanced in June 2004 through a public stock offering and listed ADRs on NASDAQ.
In March 2000, the company acquired Mitotix, a United States biotechnology firm located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This acquisition has led to the company having ~50% of its employees based in the United States and the remaining 50% in Germany. Further, the acquisition of Mitotix provided convenient proximity to GPC's long term and continuing collaboration with ALTANA Pharma AG and the ALTANA Research Institute, located in Waltham, Massachusetts.
In November 2009, Agennix AG acquired GPC Biotech [2].
In 2013 Agennix AG went into liquidation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPC_Biotech
About Altana - and how retail got screwed...
Altana's roots go back to 1873, when Heinrich Byk founded the chemicals factory Dr. Heinrich Byk Chemische Fabrik in Oranienburg. The company grew, and in 1931 it was renamed BYK-Gulden Lomberg. In 1941 majority control of the company was acquired by AFA (Akkumulatoren-Fabrik AG) which was renamed VARTA in 1962. In 1977 VARTA was split into three companies, one of which was Altana.[7]
From 1977 to 2010, Altana was publicly traded on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. Altana was also admitted to trading on the New York Stock Exchange from 2002 to 2007.
On December 19, 2006 the majority of shareholders voted to approve the sale of the pharmaceuticals division to the Danish company Nycomed. Nycomed is owned by an investment consortium led by Nordic Capital and Credit Suisse. With the sale of the pharmaceuticals division, headquartered in Konstanz, Germany, Altana lost a major pillar of its business. At that time, 9,000 of the company’s 13,500 employees were working for Altana in the pharmaceuticals sector, generating two-thirds of the company’s total revenue. And indeed, the balance-sheet revenues fell by around 60 percent in 2006, but gained over six percent in 2007.
The patent for pantaprazole, the main revenue-generator for the former pharmaceuticals division, expired in 2009/2010. While the Altana Management Board justified the divestiture of the pharmaceutical business with delays in the approval of new products, increased research and development costs as well as strict regulatory requirements in the US and Europe, shareholder activists asserted that the Management Board had invested too little in the pharmaceutical business in the preceding years and had failed to develop successor products in time to compensate for the revenue losses to be expected due to the expiry of the pantaprazole patent at the end of the decade.
The pharmaceuticals division was sold for €4.6 billion. The entire proceeds from the sale were disbursed to the shareholders, who received a special dividend of €33 per share. Critics expressed discontent that the main shareholder benefited most from the sale of the pharmaceuticals division.
Until January 1, 2007, the company was organized into the pharmaceuticals division Altana Pharma AG, formerly Byk Gulden Lomberg Chemische Fabrik, headquartered in Konstanz, and the specialty chemicals division Altana Chemie AG based in Wesel. Since the sale of the pharmaceutical business to Nycomed, Altana has been operating exclusively in the specialty chemicals segment. This restructuring was accompanied by a change in the company logo, which was unified across all subsidiaries.
On November 6, 2008, main shareholder SKion GmbH (Germany, owned by Susanne Klatten) issued a public takeover offer of €13 per share for all outstanding shares, an action which drove up the stock price. A company spokesperson stated that the intention was to delist the company from public trading. To achieve this, SKion issued a second takeover offer of €14 per share to the remaining shareholders on November 9, 2009.
On December 30, 2008, the Frankfurt Stock Exchange announced that Altana would be removed from its MDAX index, as the increase in the share held by SKion had pushed the portion of stock held in free float to under ten percent. By June 2010, SKion held 95.04 percent of all shares.
In Germany, the stock was traded mainly on the Frankfurt and Stuttgart Exchanges and the Xetra platform; internationally, it was admitted to trading on the London Stock Exchange and the NASD Group, now FINRA, in the US.
After SKion acquired the entire Altana stock through a squeeze-out, trading in this stock was suspended effective August 27, 2010.
