Stefano Pessina likes building things. A nuclear engineer, he built his family’s Italian pharmaceutical business into one of the biggest in the world, clinched 1,500 deals, amassed a huge amount of wealth – $11.5bn (£7.6bn) according to Forbes – and designed his own luxury boat.
But the 73-year-old boss of Boots does not appear to like building relationships with politicians, at least those from the Labour party. His remarks over the weekend that Labour was promoting catastrophic policies have created a political backlash and forced the Italian-born businessman to insist he is not trying to campaign against the opposition party.
Born in Pescara on the east cost of Italy, Pessina says he no longer works for money. “Now I don’t work for the money or the glory. I just work because I like building businesses,” he said, in an interview with Forbes in 2012.
His home for the past 30 years has been Monaco – the low-tax playground for the rich and famous but where Pessina is more likely to be found listening to opera than flashing his wealth around the principality. Separated from the mother of his two children many years ago, he is in a longstanding relationship with Ornella Barra, a senior director at what is now known as Walgreens Boots Alliance.
The two met, Barra told the Financial Times in 2011, when she was looking for a business partner to develop her wholesale pharmaceutical businesses in the 1980s. “In reality, Stefano represented the architect, the strategy of the company, and myself, the engine,” she said.
The current business was created only last year when Pessina orchestrated a deal between Alliance Boots and Walgreens, the US business. It was the pinnacle of deal-doing, nine years after he convinced the bosses of Boots to merge their business with Alliance Unichem during secret meetings on his yacht. A year after pulling off that controversial deal, Pessina stunned the City again by embarking on the largest buyout ever seen in Europe by taking Alliance Boots private with the help of KKR in 2007. There was more controversy last year, when newly created Walgreens Boots Alliance had to abandon plans to move the headquarters from the US to Switzerland for tax reasons in the face of a US political row and a potential customer backlash.
In an attempt at damage limitation following the latest controversy, the company – which employs 70,000 in the UK – is spelling out how much tax it pays in the UK to counteract criticism of Pessina’s residence in Monaco. In 2013-4 it says it paid some £550m to the UK exchequer, if other taxes are added on to £90m of corporation tax. “The UK remains a very important market for Walgreens Boots Alliance,” the company said. Around a third of the revenues from the Boots high street chemist business comes from dispensing NHS prescriptions.
