WOONSOCKET – Former Caremark Corp. director Roger L. Headrick has resigned from the CVS Caremark Corp. (NYSE: CVS) board of directors, effective immediately, CVS Caremark said in a filing yesterday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. He is succeeded as audit committee chairman by board member William H. Joyce, the chairman and CEO of Nalco Co., the filing said.
A member of the Caremark board since 1996, Headrick joined the board of CVS Caremark as part of the companies’ merger agreement.
“We are enormously grateful to Roger Headrick for the many years of distinguished service he has provided to Caremark,” Mac Crawford, the chairman of the CVS Caremark board, said in the SEC filing. “During his tenure on the Caremark board, Roger helped guide Caremark through a series of large and successful transactions that rewarded Caremark shareholders and transformed our company into the nation’s leading pharmacy services provider. He will be greatly missed.”
Not everyone was sad to see Headrick go. “This is a benchmark, in terms of having authentic election of directors and ensuring elector accountability,” Bill Patterson, director of CTW Investment Group, which advises unions on shareholder issues, told Bloomberg News.
Headrick had come under fire from CTW over the way that company handled its acquisition by CVS and over option grants to Caremark executives that have come under federal investigation.
But he survived a shareholder vote in May, and he said his decision to leave CVS Caremark had nothing to do with the earlier furor.
“I have a lot of other things to do that I’m involved in and want to pursue,” Headrick told Bloomberg News. He is also CEO of ProtaTek International Inc. of St. Paul, Minn., a developer of biological products for the animal health industry.
CVS Caremark Corp. (NYSE: CVS) – formed March 22 by the merger of CVS Corp. and Caremark Rx – includes 6,200 CVS/pharmacy stores, the CVS.com online pharmacy, pharmacy benefit manager and mail-order and specialty pharmacy Caremark Pharmacy Services and retail-based health care provider MinuteClinic. Additional information, including the company’s full SEC filing, is available at investor.cvs.com/.
