‘Nobody Thought It Would Come to This’: Drug Maker Teva Faces a Crisis
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement
that he would urge the company to “retain its Israeli identity,” words that seemed to mollify no one.
He insisted that Teva’s soul and brain remain in Israel, even as the company built factories and hired thousands of workers around the world.
He described this and other measures as “painful but absolutely vital,” and he added
that it was “designed solely to achieve our shared aspirations to sustain Teva as a strong global company, managed out of and based in Israel.”
This is a crushing moment for a company that has been the pride of Israel for decades.
Mr. Netanyahu agreed and said that the government would use “various means at our disposal” to urge the company to keep its plants in Jerusalem open.
“I used to say that we should thank God for bringing us the Arab boycott,” Eli Hurvitz, who retired
as Teva’s chief executive in 2002 after more than 25 years at the helm, said in 2004.
A meeting on Dec. 19 with Kare Schultz, Teva’s recently hired chief executive, yielded little more than a curt statement from the
prime minister’s office announcing plans for studying ways to provide fired workers with training and to help them find new jobs.
“Without it, our company wouldn’t exist.”
Through aggressive expansion, Mr. Hurvitz built Teva into the world’s largest producer of generic drugs.
