Perrigo CEO has slammed Mylan for months--but he owns its shares

Perrigo CEO Joseph Papa

Perrigo ($PRGO) CEO Joseph Papa has cautioned investors against taking up an offer from hostile suitor Mylan ($MYL). But Papa is already a Mylan shareholder himself.

The Dublin drugmaker's chief had a stash of 4,965 Mylan shares as of Sept. 11, Bloomberg reports, noting that he nabbed 3,840 of those in mid-March for $221,568.

"We are pleased that Mr. Papa personally saw the upside investment opportunity in Mylan stock when we were trading in the high-$50s, which of course makes his comments now about the company all the more confusing," Mylan spokeswoman Nina Devlin told the news service.

Since then, though, Mylan's stock price has taken a hit, and Papa's March shares--which at one time gained as much as $64,000 in value on buyout interest from Teva ($TEVA)--have turned into a loss, Bloomberg points out. In late July, the Israeli pharma dropped its Mylan plan--opting instead to snatch up Allergan's ($AGN) generics business--and now those shares are worth about $32,000 less than what Papa paid for them.

Papa hasn't exactly looked like Mylan's biggest fan since the Netherlands-based company made its first offer for his company back in April. He's repeatedly slammed its proposals for undervaluing Perrigo, and he's taken issue with Mylan's corporate governance, too.

"Mylan's pursuit of Perrigo at all costs has … highlighted some very troubling corporate governance values," he wrote in August in a letter to investors.

Mylan, on the other hand, has remained confident that a majority of Perrigo shareholders will favor its offer, which involves them netting $75 in cash and 2.3 Mylan shares for each Perrigo share.

"We look forward to welcoming (Papa) as a shareholder of the combined Mylan-Perrigo," Devlin told Bloomberg.

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