Bernard Charles "Barry" Sherman, (February 25, 1942 – December 13, 2017) was a Canadian businessman and philanthropist who was chairman and CEO of Apotex Inc. With an estimated net worth of US$3.2 billion at the time of his death, according to Forbes, Sherman was the 12th-wealthiest man in Canada. Another publication, Canadian Business, stated his fortune at CA$4.77 billion, ranking him the 15th richest man in Canada.
Sherman, a University of Toronto graduate with a doctorate in engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, got his start in the pharmaceutical business in the 1960s, when the estate of his uncle Louis Lloyd Winter let him run Empire Laboratories, the late uncle's drug company. This eventually led Sherman to form Apotex, where he earned a reputation among both competitors and government regulators for extreme combativeness, often including litigation. Sherman's four cousins, who were supposed to have received five-percent stakes in Empire, later sued Sherman unsuccessfully over his sale of the company.
In 1971, Sherman married his wife Honey, who would later rise to prominence in Canadian philanthropy, serving on the boards of several prominent charities. The two were found dead in their home in late 2017. Initially investigators from the Toronto Police Service considered the deaths a murder-suicide, a conclusion widely disputed in the media. In April 2019, the police said they had a "working theory" of the case and an "idea of what happened", and as of May 2022 the investigation was "active and ongoing".
Early life and education
Barry Sherman was born into a Jewish family in Toronto to Herbert Dick "Hyman" Sherman, a business partner for a zipper company, and Sara "Sarah" Sherman, an occupational therapist after her husband's death. His grandparents from both sides had fled persecution of Jews in Russia and Poland. Sherman's father died from a heart attack when Bernard was ten years old.
Sherman won a national physics contest while attending the Forest Hill Collegiate Institute and graduated with top marks. In the summer of 1958, he signed up for a Canadian Army organized student militia, but found he didn't like submitting to authority. The same year, he entered the University of Toronto's (U of T) engineering science program, at age 16 he was one of the youngest students ever to join the University’s Engineering Science program. Sherman later wrote that he chose that program specifically because it was reputedly the university's hardest.
During summers, Sherman worked for his uncle, Louis Lloyd Winter, at Winter's company Empire Laboratories, then Canada's largest wholly owned pharmaceutical company. Sherman worked as a driver, primarily picking up urine samples for pregnancy tests. When his uncle would travel, Sherman often helped watch over the operations.
Sherman graduated from U of T in 1964 with the highest honours in his class, and received the university's Governor General's Award for his thesis. He then enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, from which he received a PhD in astrophysics in 1967.
Career
Sherman later recalled that his interest in business as career was piqued when he was aged 10, when his father brought him to work at his zipper factory in downtown Toronto and gave Sherman some zippers to count and box. He later wrote that his father was surprised at how well he did, filling "more than would have been done in the same time by any of his paid staff". He also recalled feeling insulted when his father counted them.
In 1967, after completing his PhD, Sherman purchased Empire Laboratories from the executor of the estate of Louis Lloyd Winter and his wife, Beverley. The couple had died seventeen days apart in November 1965, leaving four orphaned young children: Paul Timothy, Jeffrey Andrew, Kerry Joel Dexter, and Dana Charles. Empire had been the first company to secure the compulsory rights to manufacture Hoffmann-La Roche's Valium (diazepam) in Canada, and was one of the country's largest manufacturers of Pfizer's Vibramycin (doxycycline), Upjohn Company's Orinase (tolbutamide), and the dietary sweetener saccharin. Winter's estate allowed Sherman to buy a majority stake in Empire and run it only on the condition that the four Winter children be allowed to work for the company when they reached 21, with the option to buy five-percent stakes in the company two years later, with 15-year royalties on four of its patented products. The agreement would be voided if Sherman sold Empire.