Fury over Elan’s €4.6m jet bill

MANAGEMENT at the Dublin-headquartered pharmaceutical company, Elan have ceased using private jets to get to meetings in the US after investors reacted angrily to revelations that senior executives racked up a $6 million (€4.6 million) jet hire bill.

Bloomberg reported that Elan’s chief executive Kelly Martin and other senior management figures ran up the bill with private jet maker, General Dynamics, by making numerous visits to the company’s research centre in San Francisco on one of the aviation company’s Gulfstream jets.

A spokesperson for Elan — which co-owns the lucrative Tysabri multiple sclerosis drug and has a pipeline of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease treatments at various clinical trial and pre-testing stages — confirmed that the company was not using such travel arrangements any longer, but added that the figure quoted by the news agency was random and not disclosed by the company.