If you were hoping to attend Boston Scientific Corp.’s (NYSE:BSX) shareholder’s meeting this morning, you were out of luck. The Natick, Mass.-based medical device maker is holding its annual chin wag behind closed doors.
Spokesman Paul Donovan wouldn’t comment on whether the decision, covering new CEO Ray Elliott’s first shareholders confab, is a one-off or the beginning of an ongoing policy to keep the meetings out of the public eye.
It’s no surprise that Elliott wanted a chance to soothe his flock behind closed doors. Boston Scientific has been buffeted since his tenure began last July by a series of setbacks that sent its stock to a near-10-year low. BSX stock closed May 10 at $6.60, down from an $11.77 peak in August and September.
In April, a federal judge rejected a $296 million plea agreement between the U.S. Justice Dept. and Boston Scientific subsidiary Guidant Corp. over faulty implantable defibrillators.
Earlier that month, the Natick, Mass.-based medical devices giant, which paid more than $26 billion for Guidant in 2006, agreed to plead guilty to a pair of misdemeanor criminal charges for withholding information from the Food & Drug Administration about the issue. Several patients died due to flaws in the devices that Guidant knew about and moved to correct without notifying the FDA, according to court documents.
In November 2009, Boston Scientific announced that it would pay $296 million to settle the case on behalf of Guidant, even though the alleged infractions occurred prior to its acquisition of the Indianapolis-based company, but a federal judge in Minnesota shot down the plea deal.
The company also faced a costly defibrillator shipment hold in March, when it decided to retrieve the field inventory of all its implantable cardioverter defibrillators and cardiac resynchronization therapy defibrillators due to a paperwork problem with the FDA.
That snafu rounded up a a series of unfortunate incidents in the previous two months, including thousands of layoffs and a massive, $1.7 billion settlement with Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ) to end a stent patents beef.
