IT IS HARD to hear the name J-P Garnier without thinking about that pay row. Eighteen months ago, shareholders in GlaxoSmithKline blocked a proposed £15 million golden parachute for the GSK chief executive.

As the storm raged, Garnier — born in France, based in the US, answerable to fund managers in the City of London — cut a curiously detached figure. He encapsulated the greedy drug companies at their worst.

But ask him about it, and a far more complex picture emerges. He professes not to be motivated by money, despite earning £2.8 million last year, yet argues that executives need to be rewarded. And, yes, the criticism did hurt.

“Having things written by people who had never met me was very unpleasant,” he concedes, “but I took it very well. You know the sad part? My mother cried when she read about it. She’s a very modest person, and she reads an article and her son is treated like . . . ” — he grasps for the words — “like I’m not too good. That is what hurts you.”

You wouldn’t take Garnier for a sensitive soul. He is tall, broad-shouldered, opinionated. The words come tumbling out in a French-inflected stream of consciousness. He is tough. But he is also human, talking about his daughters, recalling family holidays. Garnier is too rounded a character to be dismissed as a fat cat stereotype.

With 70 per cent of his time taken up travelling, Garnier, 57, rarely gets to enjoy his wealth. The money is there, he says, to provide for his family if he drops dead tomorrow. It also buys you the independence to speak your mind. Garnier calls it “Go to Hell” money.

“Financial independence is a wonderful luxury because I don’t have to be a ‘yes’ man — ever. It’s amazing how many of our vice-presidents are financially independent, and they really play for the house. They are more interested in doing what’s right for the company than being petty about their careers.”

This is where Garnier says the UK institutions have got it wrong. “If we make it too hard for people to reach financial independence, we’re not helping the creation of value in the company. Good governance is indispensable, but you’ve got to give our folks a chance to become millionaires.”

Garnier is ruminating on a sofa in GSK’s London office near Berkeley Square. He flew in overnight on the company Gulfstream and will spend the night in Zurich. Tomorrow, he will be flying back to his base in Philadelphia, where he lives.

He has had only three hours’ sleep yet looks fully alert. “This job requires tremendous stamina. If you don’t have stamina, you can’t be CEO of a big company. Jet lag, all that stuff, you have to cope with it. Then you have to be reasonably smart and keep a sense of humour — because, at the top, all the bad stuff comes up. You have to be able to process that and not be stressed out every time there is a piece of bad news.”

The drugs industry is brutal, but Garnier seems to thrive on it. “If it was easy, I would get bored. This is a very tough business. Think about it. You build up these products and they sell for billions and they disappear overnight once you lose their patent.”

Garnier becomes animated as he talks about competition from generic drug companies. “We’ve lost $2 billion of drugs to the generics this year. This is brutal. If you sell chocolate or photographic equipment or computers, it doesn’t quite happen that way. You kind of have a soft landing. We have to replace it instantly.”

He launches into a lecture about the costs of discovering drugs. “If you put a chart of how you discover a drug, with all the steps, on the wall, it will be more complex than putting a rocket on the moon. And by the way it will cost more, too: $800 million (£430 million). People don’t realise how hard it is to find a new medicine. The best scientists in the world work at it. Many of them go through their entire career and never discover anything.”

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