But the company’s accounting policies mean the costs of generating sales are recognised in the quarter in which those sales are generated, which is not necessarily the quarter in which the income is recognised.”Due to the significant growth of the forward order position, sales and marketing costs for the quarter will be ahead of consensus expectations. A mismatch between costs and income left shares in lastminute down more than 4 per cent yesterday after the company issued a second-quarter trading update. He has also been a patron of Queen’s University, Belfast.Galen shares have doubled in the past year, but they suffered yesterday amid rumours that Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein was looking to place Dr McClay’s remaining 12 million shares. This was eventually done at 810p a share, a 4.5 per cent discount to the previous night’s close.

The stock closed at 822p.Galen, which was floated in 1997, has grown through product acquisitions and the takeover of Warner Chilcott of the US in 2000, and is now a £1.5bn company with sales last year of £260m and profits of £70m. He says he “bought a chemistry set to keep me busy in my retirement”.Last September, he opened a £25m state-of-the-art headquarters for Chemical Synthesis Services in Craigavon, making the company Ireland’s largest chemistry service provider. However, it is the culmination of a string of disposals by Dr McClay, which included 4.3 million shares last December and a £5m slug of stock the day before Galen admitted takeover talks with Barr Laboratories had collapsed.The shy bachelorset up Galen in 1968 after several years working as a drug sales rep for Glaxo. Although he retired as non-executive president of Galen in 2001, having overseen its growth from a business providing manufacturing and laboratory services to drug makers to a specialist pharmaceuticals company in its own right, Dr McClay spent £90m buying back the original businesses. Cairn paid Shell just £4m for the Rajasthan field, where it made the discovery, less than two years ago.Cairn has said the field should produce 10,000 barrels of oil a day..

Allen McClay, Northern Ireland’s richest businessman, yesterday cashed in £97m of shares to sever his ties with Galen, the drug company he founded 36 years ago. In addition, he was 150,000 granted at 234p in 1996.As well as the £1.43m paper profit that can be taken immediately on these share options, Mr Gammell has awards under a newer Long Term Incentive Plan (LTIP) that are worth an additional £9.63m at yesterday’s closing shareprice.A more up-to-date statement on the LTIP scheme than that provided in the annual report was made by the company in an announcement in March. That showed Mr Gammell had 1,085,069 shares, including 205,069 that had already vested, under the LTIP.The LTIP’s are free shares, which do not have to be purchased by the director but are awarded when certain performance criteria are met. The group general manager, Malcolm Thoms, has 385,907 shares under the LTIP, 125,907 of which have vested, worth a total of £3.4m at yesterday’s shareprice.The news on Cairn’s dis- covery has proved a severe embarrassment for Shell. Bill Gammell, the chief executive of Cairn Energy, is sitting on a paper fortune of £11m, following the company’s spectacular oil find in India.
Cairn’s shares have rocketed up since January when it announced a major discovery in India, increasing the value of the share options held by directors.

According to the company’s annual report, published yesterday, Mr Gammell’s share options, under a scheme now abandoned, are in the money to the tune of £1.43m.He has 55,000 shares granted in 1994 with an exercise price of 78p. Although Mr Gammell, 51, has gained the most, many of the executive directors are now paper millionaires.The company’s shares have more than doubled since January, closing yesterday at 887p. It was responsible for Sly Bailey’s appointment as chief executive of Trinity Mirror, and the choice of Jane Lighting to run Five, the TV channel.. The windfall for Ms Leonard, who spent six years as a financial journalist at The Times, will add to the considerable gains she will have made since setting up the company in 1998: headhunters typically take finder’s fees equal to one-third of their appointment’s first-year earnings.Leonard Hull, which had a turnover of £2.1m in the year to 30 April 2003, fills posts for companies in the public sector as well as in the FTSE 100. Being part of a larger group “short circuits our own growth plan”, she added. All 11 Leonard Hull employees will join Whitehead Mann at its Mayfair office.News of the deal will come as a blow to Ffion Hague, the wife of the former Conservative leader, who until recently was a partner at Leonard Hull. Despite being renowned as the City’s top headhunter, Whitehead Mann’s reputation was dealt a blow earlier this year when it recommended Sir Ian Prosser for the job of J Sainsbury’s new chairman, only for shareholders immediately to hound him out.”We weren’t looking to sell but it’s very flattering to have an approach from someone like Whitehead Mann,” Ms Leonard said.