Håkan Mogren

Mogren took over Astra as the company moved from a Scandinavian producer to an international business in the early 1990s, expanding Losec through a US marketing partnership and handling the fallout from misconduct at its US joint venture in the mid-1990s. That commercial experience, and Astra's dependence on a single ageing blockbuster, framed his case for combining with Zeneca to spread research costs across a larger portfolio.

Håkan Mogren was chief executive of Astra AB and negotiated the Swedish side of the 1999 merger with Zeneca Group alongside Sir David Barnes. Astra had grown into Scandinavia's largest pharmaceutical company on the strength of Losec (omeprazole), the proton pump inhibitor its researchers discovered, which became the best-selling medicine in the world in the 1990s. Mogren became non-executive deputy chairman of AstraZeneca after the merger and served on the board until 2009. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).