The wealth of Dublin businessman Gareth Sheridan (35), who is seeking a nomination to run in the forthcoming presidential election, is centred on Florida-based Nutriband, the shares of which are traded on the Nasdaq stock exchange.
At a press conference on Thursday, Sheridan said his shares in Nutriband had a value of approximately $16 million, though the value changed with the share price. Other than that, he had savings of approximately €500,000, he said. Company filings show his annual salary as CEO was $150,000, with additional stock options.
The company is awaiting the decision of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on regulatory approval for the product it wants to develop, a new, transdermal patch for the safer delivery of the powerful opioid painkiller fentanyl.
At the press conference Sheridan said: “The company is going to be very impactful for thousands of lives a year when that FDA approval comes. I’m very proud of that.”
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A less certain assessment of the situation was made in a market filing from Nutriband when it was issuing new shares in July to fund its ongoing operations. At the time, the loss-making company had an accumulated deficit of $39.8 million.
Investors, Nutriband said, should be aware that the company was subject to significant risks.
“If we are not able to obtain FDA approval for our lead product, we may not have the resources to develop any other product, and we may not be able to continue in business,” it said.
The company’s shares have been trading on Nasdaq since October 2021. On July 2nd, 2025, it had “approximately 117 holders of record of our common stock”, according to the document.
Of that small number of shareholders, a key few own the bulk of the company. According to the July document, Sheridan then held 17.65 per cent of the stock. The man who temporarily took over as CEO from Sheridan last week, chairman Serguei Melnik, had 9.39 per cent. Other key figures had smaller percentages, but director Sergei Glinka, who bought his shares last year, had 19.33 per cent. Together these figures, the document said, had 54.39 per cent. “We have very loyal shareholders who have been with us for a very long time,” Sheridan told the press conference.
The July document showed another shareholder, Vitalie Botgros, owned 39 per cent of the company. Botgros is a former chairman of Nutriband and a long-time investor. Cumulatively, therefore, more than 90 per cent of the shares are held by a very small number of investors.
Data for the past year shows the daily closing share price has fallen to less than $4 and reached above $10. These price fluctuations directly affect the nominal wealth of each of the major shareholders.
The volume of trade has also varied enormously, with a few thousand shares trading on some days, and more than three million on other days, including Friday of last week, when the share price closed at $7.7.
Melnik, Glinka and Botgros are all from Moldova (Melnik now lives in the US). Both Glinka and Botgros previously worked (prior to the war in Ukraine) for a now-sanctioned Russian railway rolling stock conglomerate called Transmashholding, associated with a sanctioned Russian billionaire called Iskander Makhmudov.
In 2018, there was major controversy in Moldova after the takeover of Air Moldova by a Romanian company in which Melnik was reported to be a 25 per cent shareholder, with a report from a parliamentary inquiry being severely critical of the deal. At his press conference, Sheridan said this had nothing to do with Nutriband or his bid to become President of the Irish Republic.
