One of the best pharma deals in recent history has now led to one of the industry’s biggest-ever executive paydays.
Roivant awarded its top dealmaker Mayukh Sukhatme an $80.55 million cash bonus, according to a proxy filing issued Friday, in service for his work as a key architect of Roivant’s sale of an immunology asset to Roche.
That deal is widely considered one of the best-ever pharma M&A deals, after Roivant took control of a TL1A drug candidate from Pfizer for a relative pittance and then sold it 10 months later to Roche for for $7.1 billion.
Mayukh SukhatmeSukhatme joined Roivant in 2015 and now serves as the biotech’s president and chief investment officer, and is a board director. The board approved the one-time cash payout in July, with the caveat that Sukhatme would have to partially repay the bonus if he leaves the company before Oct. 1, 2025.
In response to questions from Endpoints News, Roivant CEO Matt Gline said the company has “a philosophy of setting people up to deliver extraordinary outcomes and compensating them well when they do.”
Roivant’s board established a cash retention bonus pool last December, shortly after the Roche sale closed. Employees across the company received bonuses based on their role and tenure, as well as their involvement in the TL1A program, a source familiar with the matter said. Roivant issued cash retention awards of $5.725 million to Gline and $7.465 million to chief operating officer Eric Venker, according to its proxy filing.
The TL1A deal has reshaped Roivant’s business, and the company ended March with $6.6 billion in cash and equivalents on its balance sheet. Investors and analysts are watching for what’s next, as Gline has said it will provide details “either at the very end of this summer or the beginning of the fall” on a confidential drug program expected to enter Phase 2 trials later this year, according to a transcript of Goldman Sachs’ healthcare conference in June.
The extraordinary size of Sukhatme’s payout would place him among the industry’s highest-paid executives for 2023. In 2023, only two CEOs reported larger pay packages, according to an analysis by Endpoints. (Roivant uses a different fiscal calendar than most other drug companies, leading it to file its proxy report later in the summer than most biotechs.)
The company’s top execs also took in big paydays the previous year, with Gline, Sukhatme, and Venker each receiving a pay package valued at nearly $49 million for 2022. Those were primarily made up of long-term stock options that the company stated “were intended to cover a multi-year period.”
Sukhatme’s bonus is closer to some of the largest M&A exit packages from recent company buyouts, such as the CEOs of Prometheus Biosciences, Cerevel Therapeutics, and Seagen making $220 million, $96 million, and $74 million, respectively.