Eugene Melnyk

Melnyk started Trimel Corporation, a medical publishing business, in 1982 and sold it to Thomson in 1989, the same year he founded the specialty pharmaceutical company Biovail. On March 29, 1994 he amalgamated Trimel with its subsidiary to create Biovail Corporation International, the entity that files today as Bausch Health Companies Inc.

Eugene Melnyk built Biovail into Canada's largest publicly traded pharmaceutical company, with revenue growing from about $19M in 1995 to roughly $1.07B in 2006. Biovail's approach was to take drugs whose patents had expired and reformulate them with its own controlled-release technology, including Tiazac, launched in 1996, and Wellbutrin XL, licensed for U.S. distribution in 2001. Melnyk stepped down as chief executive in 2004, the year after he bought the Ottawa Senators, and retired as chairman in 2007 after an accounting investigation that Biovail settled with the SEC and the Ontario Securities Commission. He opposed the 2010 merger with Valeant, telling the CBC that the combined company was doomed to fail under its debt load, a warning that the 2015 collapse and the roughly $30B of debt left behind made difficult to dismiss.