EpiPen CEO awarded MBA with ‘grades pulled out of thin air’ because of her powerful connections

David Ferguson DAVID FERGUSON
25 AUG 2016 AT 13:13 ET                  

A Pittsburgh newspaper found that Mylan, Inc. CEO Heather Bresch never completed her masters degree in business administration (MBA), but high-ranking officials at West Virginia University altered her academic records a decade after the fact to make it look as if she had.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported back in 2007 that Bresch actually completed fewer than half the course hours required by WVU’s MBA program. Bresch — daughter of Democratic West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin — has come under heavy scrutiny in recent days after Mylan dramatically raised the price of it’s top-selling EpiPen device.

In October of 2007, when Bresch was promoted to the chief operations officer (COO) position at Mylan — which is based in Cecil, WV and chaired by Milan Puskar, WVU’s biggest donor — the Post-Gazette called the university to verify Bresch’s academic credentials. The university at first said that Bresch had never completed her MBA, then days later announced that she had finished it in Dec. 1999. Since then, after an investigation, the university has reversed course and revoked her degree.

Officials initially said that an interdepartmental clerical error had caused WVU’s records to show that Bresch had dropped out of the MBA program. However, as reporters dug deeper, they found that this was a canard.

“(I)nformation collected by the Post-Gazette over the last two months — culled from university records, sources inside the school and interviews with Ms. Bresch’s former classmates and associates — raises questions about how the university decided to grant Ms. Bresch her degree,” wrote Patricia Sabatini and Len Boselovic.

Bresch, the Post-Gazette found, only finished 22 of the 48 hours of course study required for an MBA before dropping out of the program. Apparently, “high-ranking officials revised her university records despite a lack of solid evidence to support the reconstruction. Moreover, it suggests officials did so in a way that violated WVU’s internal procedures and those used by other accredited universities.”

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http://www.rawstory.com/2016/08/epipen-ceo-awarded-mba-with-grades-pulled-out-of-thin-air-because-of-her-powerful-connections/