Canadian businessman (1942–2017)
Bernard Charles "Barry" Sherman, (February 25, 1942 – December 13, 2017) was a Canadian businessman and philanthropist who was chairman and CEO of Apotex Inc. With an estimated net worth of US$3.2 billion at the time of his death, according to "Forbes", Sherman was the 12th-wealthiest man in Canada. Another publication, "Canadian Business", stated his fortune at CA$4.77 billion, ranking him the 15th richest man in Canada.
Sherman, a University of Toronto graduate with a doctorate in engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, got his start in the pharmaceutical business in the 1960s, when the estate of his uncle Louis Lloyd Winter let him run Empire Laboratories, the late uncle's drug company. This eventually led Sherman to form Apotex, where he earned a reputation among both competitors and government regulators for extreme combativeness, often including litigation. Sherman's four cousins, who were supposed to have received five-percent stakes in Empire, later sued Sherman unsuccessfully over his sale of the company.
In 1971, Sherman married his wife Honey, who would later rise to prominence in Canadian philanthropy, serving on the boards of several prominent charities. The two were found dead in their home in late 2017. Initially investigators from the Toronto Police Service considered the deaths a murder-suicide, a conclusion widely disputed in the media. In April 2019, the police said they had a "working theory" of the case and an "idea of what happened", and as of May 2022 the investigation was "active and ongoing".
Early life and education.
Barry Sherman was born into a Jewish family in Toronto to Herbert Dick "Hyman" Sherman, a business partner for a zipper company, and Sara "Sarah" Sherman, an occupational therapist after her husband's death. His grandparents from both sides had fled persecution of Jews in Russia and Poland. Sherman was ten years old when his father died from a heart attack.
Sherman won a national physics contest while attending the Forest Hill Collegiate Institute and graduated with top marks. In the summer of 1958, he signed up for a Canadian Army organized student militia, but found he didn't like submitting to authority. The same year, he entered the University of Toronto's (U of T) engineering science program, at age 16 he was one of the youngest students ever to join the University’s Engineering Science program. Sherman later wrote that he chose that program specifically because it was reputedly the university's hardest.
During summers, Sherman worked for his uncle, Louis Lloyd Winter, at Winter's company Empire Laboratories, then Canada's largest wholly owned pharmaceutical company. Sherman worked as a driver, primarily picking up urine samples for pregnancy tests. When his uncle would travel, Sherman often helped watch over the operations.
Sherman graduated from U of T in 1964 with the highest honours in his class, and received the university's Governor General's Award for his thesis. He then enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, from which he received a PhD in astrophysics in 1967.
Career.
Sherman later recalled that his interest in business as a career was piqued when he was aged 10, when his father brought him to work at his zipper factory in downtown Toronto and gave Sherman some zippers to count and box. He later wrote that his father was surprised at how well he did, filling "more than would have been done in the same time by any of his paid staff". He also recalled feeling insulted when his father counted them.
In 1967, after completing his PhD, Sherman purchased Empire Laboratories from the executor of the estate of Louis Lloyd Winter and his wife, Beverley. The couple had died seventeen days apart in November 1965, leaving four orphaned young children: Paul Timothy, Jeffrey Andrew, Kerry Joel Dexter, and Dana Charles. Empire had been the first company to secure the compulsory rights to manufacture Hoffmann-La Roche's Valium (diazepam) in Canada, and was one of the country's largest manufacturers of Pfizer's Vibramycin (doxycycline), Upjohn Company's Orinase (tolbutamide), and the dietary sweetener saccharin. Winter's estate allowed Sherman to buy a majority stake in Empire and run it only on the condition that the four Winter children be allowed to work for the company when they reached 21, with the option to buy five-percent stakes in the company two years later, with 15-year royalties on four of its patented products. The agreement would be voided if Sherman sold Empire.
That voiding happened in 1969. Sherman worked out a deal to swap shares with Empire's largest customer that put it in control of the company. In 1970 he invested in the American firm Barr Laboratories with US-based partners, became its largest shareholder and served as Barr's president. He would eventually control a third of Barr's stock. Barr won the first rights to manufacture generic versions of Eli Lilly's Prozac. Today, Barr is a part of Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, the world's largest generic drugmaker, following Teva's acquisition of Barr in 2008.
In January 1972, Sherman and Ulster Limited sold Empire to the Quebec-based Canadian operations of publicly traded International Chemical and Nuclear Corporation (ICN) of California, for 57,000 shares (Valeant Pharmaceuticals). This transaction voided his arrangement with the Winter estate. A year later, Sherman started Apotex with a few former Empire personnel; it was incorporated in 1974. This privately owned and Sherman-controlled company claims to be Canada's largest domestic pharmaceutical manufacturer. Sherman also became involved in nutraceutical manufacturing and other businesses, founding the National Institute of Nutrition (NION) with Richard Kashenberg. He later sold NION to Schiff and continued on to Apotex.
By 2016, Apotex employed over 10,000 people as one of Canada's largest drug manufacturers, with over 260 products selling in over 115 countries. Revenues were about $1.5 billion annually.
Other businesses.
Sherman also personally invested in other, non-pharmaceutical businesses. Often these had dubious prospects and turned out to be fraudulent schemes. For example, Sherman put money into a yacht-chartering company which turned out to be a shell corporation that had never bought any yachts. Later, he bought a majority stake in a company that sold a nutritional supplement marketed by American fraudster Kevin Trudeau. In 1996, when US regulators began investigating the fraud claims that would later lead to Trudeau's imprisonment, Sherman sold half his stake to the Apotex Foundation. Sherman's associates felt he was often too generous and trusting with these businesses, failing to do proper due diligence.
For fifteen years, Sherman partnered with Frank D'Angelo, a fruit-juice maker who was trying to branch out into other businesses. The two produced the Cheetah Power Surge energy drink and started Steelback Brewery; when D'Angelo Brands went bankrupt in 2007, Sherman lost C$100 million. Sherman continued backing D'Angelo's filmmaking venture even after D'Angelo was arrested on sexual assault and obstruction of justice charges, later dropped, in 2009. Sherman's money financed all eight films D'Angelo had made through 2018.
In the late 2010s, Sherman worked with another man later convicted of fraud, Shaun Rootenberg. The two had been introduced by a mutual friend, Cineplex Odeon co-founder Myron Gottlieb, who had met Rootenberg in prison following his conviction for fraud in the collapse of Livent. Rootenberg persuaded Sherman to invest in his development of an online trivia game; Sherman later filed a lawsuit against Rootenberg, alleging the latter had simply pocketed the money.
Personal life.
Sherman married Honey Reich in 1971, a fellow U of T graduate of Austrian nationality who was the daughter of Polish Jewish Holocaust survivors. The couple had four children: a son, Jonathon, and three daughters, Lauren, Alexandra and Kaelen.
While Sherman socialized regularly with Honey, he was known to his friends and family as a workaholic. At the social events they attended, she was more outgoing while he often kept to himself and discussed mainly his businesses. The Sherman family frequented a ski club on winter weekends, but while Honey and the children availed themselves of the trails, Sherman remained in the lodge poring over documents. Similarly, Sherman did not play golf and would spend vacations reviewing business material.
Even as his fortune grew, Sherman drove his cars until they reached an advanced state of disrepair; a friend worried that one, a Ford Mustang, was so decrepit that it was leaking carbon monoxide into the passenger compartment. For his 50th birthday, Honey gave him a red sports car with a bow on it in front of assembled guests. He asked her to take it back, and she did.
Philanthropy.
Sherman, with his wife, donated a record $50 million to the United Jewish Appeal, and other Jewish charities, despite Sherman himself being an atheist. The couple provided funds to build a major addition to the Baycrest Health Sciences geriatric centre, and to other community centres in the Toronto area. The couple were also major donors to the United Way. The Apotex Foundation had donated over $50 million worth of medicines to disaster zones since 2007. Sherman personally often loaned money to Apotex employees who needed help.
After his death, "Maclean's" found that Sherman himself, through one of the many companies he controlled, had made large donations to several of the foundations he had set up in his or Apotex's name. Under Canadian tax law, this entitled him to an equivalent tax credit. The foundations were then allowed to loan him back money and did, loaning him almost the total of the $6 million he gave, an unusually high amount. The leader of a private charity watchdog group said Sherman was "using his foundations as a piggy bank" and called on Canadian lawmakers to change the law.
Reputation and personality.
Sherman had a mixed reputation, or what the "National Post" called "Two Legacies". Sherman and his wife were described by Toronto Mayor John Tory as "kind, good people", and he was widely praised for his philanthropic giving. On the other hand, Morton Shulman, a physician and former member of the Ontario Parliament who late in his life fought Sherman over drug development, called him "the only person I have ever met with no redeeming features whatsoever". A "Bloomberg" writer reporting on Sherman's death said that some rival generic drug company executives used "unprintable" language to describe him.
University of Ottawa law professor Amir Attaran described Sherman as "a deplorable human being" in reference to his business practices, claiming that he gouged Canadians with high drug prices: "Canadians pay more for generic drugs than almost every other country. He sought to manipulate our system to enrich himself and impoverish Canadian patients who used his drugs." Attaran accused Sherman of crossing ethical lines concerning intellectual property rights to "fight as many as 100 battles at a time in court to challenge drug patents and make way for Apotex's generic prescriptions" with little end benefit to consumers. By contrast, Sherman saw Apotex as a force for good, saying, "If we're thieves, we're Robin Hoods."
As told in Jeffrey Robinson's 2001 book "Prescription Games: Money, Ego and Power Inside the Pharmaceutical Industry", Sherman himself acknowledged the long-running conflict between Apotex and the major pharmaceutical companies over drug patents, saying, "The branded drug companies hate us. They have private investigators on us all the time. The thought once came to my mind: why didn't they just hire someone to knock me off?" Private investigators working for the German company Bayer AG, one of the world's largest drug companies, reportedly considered planting illegal drugs in Sherman's car during an operation to lure Apotex employees into informing on whether the company was knowingly infringing Bayer's patents.
Litigation.
Apotex was much more likely than other Canadian companies to respond to adverse regulatory decisions by suing the government agencies involved. At the time of Sherman's death, the company had filed an estimated 1,200 cases against the government in Federal Court; a spokesman for Health Canada, named as a defendant in dozens of Apotex's suits, complained that the company's litigiousness had cost Canadian taxpayers millions of dollars in legal fees. "It was intimidating to come back from lunch and find an urgent memo on your desk saying you’ve got to get over to Federal Court because Sherman was at it again," recalled Michele Brill-Edwards, former Health Canada head of drug regulation. "He quickly demonstrated that in fact you can bully the government and you can intimidate." One of Apotex's lawsuits, over the company's application to make a generic version of the antidepressant Trazodone, took thirty years until the Federal Court of Appeal ruled that the government had mishandled it. Sherman himself once told employees that Apotex was primarily a legal