Glaxo investors get threat letter
UK demo against Huntingdon Life Sciences
Animal rights activists have targeted Huntingdon
Police are investigating threatening letters sent by animal rights extremists to small investors in drugs giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK).
GSK said at least 50 shareholders were threatened with having their details posted on the internet if they did not sell their shares within 14 days.
The threats came from the Campaign Against Huntingdon Life Sciences.
Activists have targeted animal testing firm Huntingdon Life Sciences and its business partners for years.
Testing 'vital'
GSK added that it had been contacted by investors, many of them elderly, who felt "victimised" by the letters.
It has told anyone who receives threatening correspondence to keep the letters and report them to the police.
Meanwhile, to protect the privacy of its investors, GSK has advised them to transfer their shares to the GSK corporate nominee service or ask their stockbroker to hold them in a nominee account.
Stockbroker groups have denounced the campaign as "terrorism", while medical researchers have defended animal testing as a "small but vital" part of medical research.
"We do this research to save people's lives and to prevent human suffering and we have to use animals," Research Defence Society chief executive Dr Simon Festing said.
Glaxo headquarters in London
It's completely the wrong target if you actually want to change what kind of testing is done on drugs
James Galpin, Glaxo investor
Without animal testing, many drugs that save millions of lives, including polio vaccines and asthma treatments, would never have made it onto the market, he added.
However, animal rights groups, such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, have defended the campaign.
"If you invest in a company that is involved in animal torture, then you should expect - it's a public limited company - that information is open to the public," one campaigner, John Curtin, said.
However, one investor who received one of the letters, former Glaxo employee James Galpin, appeared unfazed.
"It's completely the wrong target if you actually want to change what kind of testing is done on drugs," Mr Galpin said.
"Targeting one individual pharmaceutical company isn't going to do anything.
"You have to target the regulatory authorities who decide what information needs to go into a package before they will approve a new medicine," he added.
An intimidation campaign led to Huntingdon being delisted from the London Stock Exchange, and its US parent company had its listing on the New York Stock Exchange postponed last autumn.
GSK said it would continue to work with HLS despite the threats.
"We deplore long-term campaigns of violence, intimidation and harassment against employees, their families and people associated with the company," a GSK statement said.
The Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry said that such attacks had recently fallen to their lowest level for more than five years.
"Although several hundred letters have been sent out, there are only a handful of extremists out there," the association's director of science and technology, Philip Wright, told BBC News.
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Increasingly they are having Asbos put on them and a number have been given or are awaiting a prison sentence."
Smaxo-Glith-Kline and domestic terrorism.
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