This doesn’t come as a shock. Andy Bodnar, you may recall, had the distinction of getting skunked by Apotex’s Barry Sherman last year while negotiating the ill-fated deal to forestall generic Plavix and preserve Bristol-Myers’ strangehold on the market. The senior vp was dispatched by former ceo Peter Dolan to do the dirty work.

Since then, Bodnar left the drugmaker and today he’s resigned from the ImClone Systems board, where he’d been Bristol’s representative. He’s being replaced by Jules Haimovitz, an exec with Dick Clark Productions. Bodnar was reached at home by Bloomberg News, but declined to comment.

The announcement comes one day after Bristol-Myers reached a deal with the Department of Justice and agreed to plead guilty to two criminal charges of making false statements to a federal agency. The drugmaker will pay a $1 million fine.

Here’s a key line in the company’s press release yesterday announcing the deal: “The charges relate to representations made by a former Bristol-Myers Squibb senior executive during the renegotiation of the proposed settlement agreement in May 2006 that were not disclosed to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.”

Andrew Bonfield, the drugmaker’s cfo, joined the ImClone board last month. As of February, Bristol- Myers held 17 percent of ImClone, which has been undergoing a shake-up under the direction of Carl Icahn.

The Bristol-Myers press release announcing the resolutions;
Bloomberg News.[tags]Andrew Bodnar, Apotex, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Generics, Peter Dolan, Plavix[/tags]