CureVac investors had to have strong nerves in mid-June: The Tübingen-based biotech company presented figures from a clinical study that showed that rapid approval of the Covid vaccine candidate would probably not work.
During the night, the price plummeted, the market value of the Nasdaq-listed company halved to the order of 8 billion euros.
Little has changed since then.
Just in the phase after the crash, four top managers from CureVac sold large blocks of shares - “cashed in”, as the magazine “Business Insider” writes. In total, they would have made 38 million dollars (the equivalent of 32 million euros), reports the magazine. As the company confirms, the sellers include the co-founder of CureVac, Florian von der Mülbe, who was recently replaced as Chief Production Officer, Mariola Fotin-Mleczek, Chief Technology Officer, Pierre Kemula Chief Financial Officer and Ulrike Gnad-Vogt, Head of Clinical Development.
What may seem to the layman as if these CureVac managers have left the hope that their own company could still have a great future as an mRNA specialist is clearly rejected by CureVac: “Our board members are still completely convinced of CureVac and our technology and dedicate themselves with all their energy to the further development of the company, ”said a spokeswoman when asked.
The fact that shares were being sold right now is a fact that the people concerned could no longer influence. The time of the transaction was fixed months in advance. They probably drove the expectation that by the end of the second quarter CureVac would already have approval from the European Medicines Agency EMA for the Covid vaccine and that the price would therefore be correspondingly high. The top managers are considered permanent insiders who, on the one hand, have detailed knowledge of the company and, on the other hand, often maintain important contacts with the public, with the media, scientists and politicians. They are generally subject to strict rules in listed companies to prevent these executives from taking advantage of their position to sell or sell shares even at the best time.even before investors can have the information.
In the United States, there is a so-called "10b5-1 plan," a stock trading plan that determines months in advance when stocks can be sold. "There is therefore no logical causality between the transactions described and current company developments at CureVac," emphasizes the Tübingen-based company. There were also no stock deals before the results of the clinical study that led to the sharp drop in the share price were published.
What is also flatly denied at CureVac is the presentation by the “Business Insider”, according to which the top people mentioned are said to have given up up to 99 percent of their share ownership. Rather, it is so that after the IPO last summer, only 10 percent of the virtual shares were issued to the top managers as a whole and are allocated after certain milestones have been reached. Even if almost all of the first tranche were sold, that would be less than ten percent and the CureVac managers would be entitled to further allocations of shares when the next agreed milestones were reached. What, on the other hand, was not possible: that the low price is used to buy shares, as normal investors might have done in some cases.Marco Rau, chief legal advisor of the Tübingen company, told the FAZ that this was not possible due to the close proximity to the publication of data