Moderna chair defends executive hiring process after CFO fiasco

Moderna’s chair has launched an unflinching defence of the board’s executive hiring process after it was forced to fire its new chief financial last week following just one day in the job.

Noubar Afeyan dismissed suggestions the board could have done anything differently, insisting it had asked all the right questions but was not told about an internal investigation into financial reporting at Jorge Gomez’s former employer due to legal constraints.

Afeyan said the executive search company contracted by Moderna, the biotech company behind one of the leading Covid-19 vaccines, was also blameless because it was unaware of the probe by dental equipment maker Dentsply Sirona, which was disclosed last week.

“I’m quite convinced that the fact that those facts were not obtainable to us had a legal context,” Afeyan said in an interview with the Financial Times, adding that there was no doubt “whether we asked enough questions or the right questions”.

“Both the process of recruiting and vetting, and the process with which we reacted to the new facts that came out, were completely appropriate,” added Afeyan, who has chaired the biotech since he co-founded it in 2010. “I can’t think of a different approach that we could have used under those circumstances.”

Some corporate governance experts have criticised the Moderna board for failing to detect potential problems at Dentsply, especially after the dental products group fired its former chief executive Don Casey on April 19 without explanation. Casey’s ouster happened several weeks before Gomez started his new job at Moderna.

Gomez and Casey did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Companies the size of Moderna, which has a market valuation of $57bn, typically conduct exhaustive due diligence on C-suite hires, and the biotech company’s failure to unearth the issues at Gomez’s previous employer has rekindled long-simmering concerns about its governance.

However, Moderna has said it acted quickly upon learning of the investigation by Dentsply and announced Gomez’s departure the next day, May 11.

Since then, the company has said it will attempt to claw back Gomez’s $700,000 exit payment, equivalent to one year’s salary, if any wrongdoing is unearthed by the investigation.

The departure of Gomez has refocused attention on Moderna’s corporate culture. Several high-profile executives have left the company over the past 18 months, including chief commercial officer Corinne Le Goff, who was forced out in December after less than a year in the role.

However, Afeyan said it was wrong to conflate the departure of an executive with a wider culture problem at Moderna, which underwent a transformation from a research-stage biotech company to a vaccine powerhouse during the pandemic.

He said: “I think that a company that has gone from an unknown company of 700 people before Covid to 3,500 people today . . . the scale that they’ve achieved and the growth is completely commensurate with the leadership changes.”

Afeyan said the departure of Gomez was not a significant setback for the company because former CFO David Meline had agreed to return from retirement to the role until a successor can be found.

“David built a very good mature financial organisation. So I feel that we are up to the current task and we will find the appropriate leader as soon as we can,” Afeyan said.

“We’ll do the best just like we did before,” he added.