Ousted AstraZeneca chief David Brennan will get £4.4m payout Mr Brennan left AstraZeneca after 36 years with the company, six of those as chief executive. His tenure at the top of the company coincided with a disastrous series of failed drug development programmes and a steady decline in earnings. Seemingly unable to stop the rot and faced with a growing murmur of discontent from shareholders he stepped down in April. Despite coming from a blue-collar working class background in New York state, Mr Brennan enjoyed a meteoric career, the vast majority of which was at Astra. He started working in the pharmaceutical industry for Merck in 1975, selling blood-pressure and asthma related remedies. Through a series of mergers he ended up working with Astra, being appointed to the top job in 2006. Under his stewardship Astra became a byword for the problems in the pharmaceutical industry. Attacks by generic drug manufacturers saw revenue from blockbuster drugs leak away. Drug development programmes the company had invested millions in failed to reach the commercial stage. It also faces losing its patents on acid reflux drug Nexium in 2014 and the statin Crestor, Astra's biggest-selling product, two years later. The underperformance culminated in Astra announcing a 38pc fall in first-quarter profits this year and Mr Brennan resigning. Despite the poor performance, Mr Brennan has been one of the best paid chief executives in the FTSE 100, behind only Bob Diamond, formerly of Barclays, and WPP's Sir Martin Sorrell last year. Despite the multi-million pound payout, Astra was praised for the way it handled the announcement on Mr Brennan's pay-off. Sarah Wilson, of shareholder group Manifest, said: "The shareholder spring clearly had a marked impact on remuneration committees. This kind of disclosure would have been unthinkable 12 months ago. Companies are now seeing the value of revealing all the cost of executive churn. The remuneration committee is to be applauded. The action by Astra comes after criticism of how a number of other companies have handled "golden parachute" payments. These date back to RBS's handling of Fred Goodwin's pension and include Barclays" £2m payout to Mr Diamond.