Solgar is not a little family run business. NBTY owns Solgar. Dance to the music of the global pharmas.
(If you cannot be anonymous change your name! Or if you want to make it difficult to be sued change your name!)
Holly at Raw Cuisine whose e-zine regularly carries varied and interesting items ran a piece on her website about Monsanto owning Solgar and was “warned off” by James J Gormley, who wrote to her from Solgar as their Associate Director of Marketing.
He says it is “completely false” that Monsanto and Solgar are in any way connected. He says “To reiterate, please be aware that the ridiculous Monsanto rumor that has been floating around (here and there) since at least 1999 is categorically false, and, in fact, couldn’t be further from the truth.” No it very nearly happened in 1998! And Solgar was owned by a very big Pharma from 1998 to 2005
There is a deliberate effort in his letter to give an untrue perpective on events – well he is a marketing man so no surprise there. There was a moment as you will see below when both companies were the target of an even larger pharma corporation’s attempted takeover. Solgar was acquired but the Monsanto takeover collapsed after several months of negotiations broke down.
From his letter you would think Solgar was a nice little family run business. Not so, Solgar is part of a larger $2 billion group.
James J Gormley is from his letter to Holly associated with Citizens for Health as well as being adviser to Solgar.
Citizens for Health is suspect.Citizens for Health appears to be an organisation set up by vested interests to provide an ineffectual outlet for anti-codex activity. The case for this is set out below and more info from
( http://www.nocodexgenocide.com/page/page/3312735.htm
for a fuller expose. )
Seeing Through Spin of "Citizens for Health" and "The Natural Solutions Foundation" on the CODEX Vitamin Issue
CONTROLLED OPPOSITION GROUPS
"Citizens for Health" and "Natural Solutions Foundation" are controlled opposition groups on the Codex issue. We believe the true purpose of these groups is to assist the pharma dominated vitamin trade associations by recommending grass roots actions which appear plausible on the surface to the poorly informed, but which upon close inspection fail to hold up to careful scrutiny.
We believe these groups are attempting to intentionally divert grass roots attention from the strategy of IAHF and allied organizations. In a nutshell, their mission is to:
A) Con people into believing that we can change Codex AT Codex (despite the fact that we have zero political influence over the unelected bureaucrats from the FDA and its international equivalents that serve as delegates at these highly rigged meetings.) and
B) Con people into believing that countries which adopt "Model Legislation" patterned after the US Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act would be "protected" in the event of a WTO Trade Dispute Ruling against them. (James Turner, Esq., who originated this plan has failed to explain any viable legal mechanism to support his contention that this could work. * See IAHF's detailed analysis of CFH and NSF's "LEGAL SUMMARY" below.
C) Con people into believing that they're "fighting back" by signing a petition to US Codex Manager Ed Scarbrough (an unelected bureaucrat at the USDA who has never attempted to rein in FDA officials who've served as US Delegates at CODEX (even when their actions have gone directly against US law.)
Even when Scarbrough and the US Codex Delegates have obviously IGNORED this petition at recent Codex meetings, Citizens for Health and the Natural Solutions Foundation would still have us believe that signing it and sending it in to Scarbrough are a viable means of "fighting back."
D) Con people into believing that there is "no connection" between sovereignty destroying trade agreements such as NAFTA, CAFTA, FTAA and Codex in an obvious effort to keep people from exercising the political leverage that we DO have with CONGRESS (but which we DON'T have with unelected Codex bureaucrats from the world's FDA's.) Citizens for Health and now also the "Natural Solutions Foundation" have a long history of doing spin against true grass roots anti Codex campaigns.
These groups are making ZERO EFFORT to alert the public to the dire need to oppose clear efforts to destroy America and to force us into a planned North American Union.
Its clear that their TRUE MOTIVE is to support the agenda of the large pharmaceutical companies that are controlling the vitamin trade associations from the top-down which WANT CODEX, which WANT one size fits all regulations for the planet. In this section we explore this and also explore the gross conflicts of interest inherent in these organizations which have very close ties with such pharma dominated vitamin trade associations as CRN, and NNFA…….
So how did the rumoured link between Solgar and Monsanto come about?
In June 1998 it was announced that American Home Products ( now Wyeth Corporation)would acquire Monsanto for $33.4 billion to become top seller of prescription drugs in the US and separately that it would acquire Solgar
http://www.democracynow.org/1998/6/5/monsanto_and_american_home_products_merger
But the deal with Monsanto deal broke down in October 1998
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A06E0DB143AF937A25753C1A96E958260
What then happened was that old Monsanto was broken up into three parts new Monsanto the agri-business, Pharmacia the pharma business and another company to hold all the legal problems old Monsanto had accumulated and some of which are still playing out.
Pharmacia was then taken over by Pfizer to become the largest pharma research company in the world.
But what of American Home Products? Well firstly they acquired Solgar in June 1998. You can see how close the possibility of Monsanto and Solgar being in bed together was to happening and also that it did not quite happen. At that time the possibility gave rise to a consumer outcry and campains.
Who are American Home Products? They are now called Wyeth Corporation and are a Fortune 500 company with a turnover of $20.4 billion and employing over 50,000. They sold off Solgar for $115 million to NBTY (formerly Nature’s Bounty) in 2005.
http://www.naturalfoodsmerchandiser.com/ArticlePage/tabid/66/itemid/1658/Default.aspx
It was Solgar being taken over that gave rise to the creation of Viridian in 1999 where the owner is Cheryl Thallon.
Cheryl has worked in the natural products industry since she was 21, working in health food stores. Trained as a journalist, she became editor of Natural Food Trader magazine in 1988, before joining Solgar Vitamins as Marketing Director in 1991 where she stayed for 8 years, until shortly after the company was sold to Wyeth.
NBTY had a turnover in 2007 of just over $2.0 billion, has over 4 million square feet of operational buildings and employs 10,800 people as well as Solgar products it has all these
“NBTY is a leading vertically integrated manufacturer and distributor of a broad line of high-quality, value-priced nutritional supplements in the United States and throughout the world. The Company markets approximately 2,000 products under several brands, including Nature's Bounty(R), Vitamin World(R), Puritan's Pride(R), Holland & Barrett(R) UK, Rexall(R), Sundown(R), MET-Rx(R), WORLDWIDE Sport Nutrition(R), American Health(R), GNC (UK)(R), DeTuinen(R) Netherlands and Le Naturiste(TM) Canada. “
As far as who runs Solgar it is NBTY and the guys that run it are Scott Rudolph who has shares worth about $120 million and Kamil Harvey who holds about $36m. Rand Skolnick CEO of Solgar is not even on the board of the NBTY holding company.
NBTY are still picking up bargains in the health supplement world and have about 1150 stores in the US, Canada and Europe. They are now acquiring US bankrupt supplement company Leiner
http://www.bizjournals.com/charlotte/stories/2008/06/09/daily38.html?jst=s_cn_hl (see related news on this page link)
In the US NBTY has a shop chain Vitamin World and a mail order operation Puritan’s Pride, it has Le Naturiste stores in Canada, De Tuinen in Holland and Nature’s Way in Ireland.So as well as distributing they also sell through their own shops. Solgar in the UK is run through Boots Herbal Stores (not Boots the Chemist or Boots Company Plc)
So getting to the UK and Holland and Barrett. How did they get into NBTY. They bought Holland and Barrett from German group GEHE Ag. Yes you got it in one - another huge pharma sold Holland and Barrett in August 1997. Gehe Ag is the 2nd largest wholesaler of pharmaceuticals in Germany. Yes like the others it has changed its name and is now called Celesio. It is a private family owned company owned by the Hanille family. It is one of the three largest drug wholesalers in Europe with 2300 drug stores (including Lloyds Pharmacy in the UK). It has a turnover of 22.4 billion euros and employs 37,000 staff.
So many little brands like Solgar are not independent and so are not what they appear. What seems to be happening is a lot of positioning. Agri-businesses are being separated from pharmas, pharmas are divesting their supplement businesses. But even now supplement businesses are dominated about 70% by pharmas as Robert Verkerk, Executive Director for the Alliance for Natural Health and Advisor to the National Health Federation team on Codex Alimentarius explained in his Alternative View presentation in April 2008 Double Jeopardy against Natural Health which you can purchase for £5 from http://www.ianrcrane.co.uk/index.php?act=viewProd&productId=43 He explains why the vitamin and supplement sector has not squawked more about Codex Alimentarius ridiculous plans as it rather suits them to medicalise supplements and shows how it will creep in over the next few years.
NBTY appears to be the chosen vehicle to acquire health supplement businesses. It could later become the vehicle for one or more pharmas to medicalise the health supplements as Codex bites in.
Watch and expect increasing numbers of foods to be banned and classified as toxic in the next few years.
Watch and expect that there will be increasing numbers of exposes of GE/GM contamination of health care products like this expose on Vitamin C and Solgar and others
http://www.organicconsumers.org/ge/vitaminc.cfm
The global pharmas are all waltzing around the Codex knowing that they only have to wait and important foods and all supplements will be banned or classified as drugs - as with this little circular logic
Drug companies ripped off the lovastatin molecules from red yeast rice, then patented them. Once they achieved FDA approval for their "statin drugs," it was easy to file a petition requesting the outlawing of red yeast rice, claiming the supplement was "adulterated" with drugs! Which drugs? Statin drugs, of course -- the very same drugs that were isolated from red yeast rice in the first place!
Holly’s original post: http://www.rawcuisine.co.uk/what-on-earths-going-on/solgar-monsanto-rumour-debunked/ |
