The conclusion of the investigative panel was stunningly straightforward: Mylan Inc. executive Heather Bresch did not earn a master's degree in business administration from West Virginia University and officials had no basis for awarding it.

But the panel's blistering report, released two weeks ago, also offers a detailed, inside look at how far officials were willing to go for the governor's daughter, inventing explanations, falsifying her records and repeatedly misleading the public.

Investigators unanimously concluded the decision to award the degree last fall, nearly a decade after Ms. Bresch left the program, was rife with favoritism.

The findings triggered the resignations of Provost Gerald Lang and business school dean R. Stephen Sears from their administrative posts, and launched widespread calls for the ouster of President Michael Garrison, a long-time family friend and former business associate of Ms. Bresch, whose boss, Mylan Chairman Milan Puskar, is WVU's biggest benefactor. Mr. Lang and Mr. Sears have said they will remain at WVU to teach.

WVU's scramble to justify the acceptance of Ms. Bresch's claim that she earned the degree in December 1998 began Oct. 11, when the Post-Gazette made a routine call to the registrar to confirm a master's degree listed among the newly appointed chief operating officer's credentials. Initially, the paper was told she did not finish her degree.

Days later, ignoring official records showing she did not earn the degree, top officials began a series of changing explanations.

They told the newspaper the registrar was wrong, dismissing the apparent discrepancy as a clerical error. They said Ms. Bresch had earned her degree in 1998 but was not officially recorded as a graduate because she had not paid the $50 graduation fee.

"She completed all the course work necessary to graduate, but we discovered that wasn't put on the record because the fee wasn't paid," spokeswoman Amy Neil said at the time.

When pressed, Ms. Neil added that because of a mix-up, the business school had failed to "transfer" some of Ms. Bresch's grades to the admissions and records office. She declined to say how many credits were involved but added that other students in the M.B.A. program had reported similar problems.

As the five-member panel would find, university administrators knew at the time both statements were untrue.

At the same time, the Post-Gazette had learned Ms. Bresch's transcript was missing 22 credits, or nearly half the 48 required, indicating that if there had been a mix-up, it was a massive one.


While Ms. Neil insisted that the business school had located records to verify the degree, behind the scenes, officials could find no such records and were piecing together a plan.

In a hasty decision reflecting "failures of process and failures of leadership," administrators added courses to Ms. Bresch's transcript that she neither took nor paid for, awarding her grades "simply pulled from thin air," investigators found.

Meanwhile, Ms. Bresch insisted to the newspaper that she had finished her degree in 1998. She declined to release a transcript or other documentation, saying her word and the university's word "were better than a transcript." She has declined to speak with the Post-Gazette since that time.

Mylan, too, sought to quash the issue.

Employees at Mylan and a political action committee affiliated with the company from 2009 until 2012 contributed a total of $127,500 toward Manchin's special election to the Senate and then re-election in 2012, the second-largest amount of any single company toward Manchin, according to OpenSecrets.org.

Records from OpenSecrets show that Mylan has given $72,543 to Senate and House of Representative members' campaign committees so far this year, but Manchin's more than $57,000 haul in 2012 from the company is more than five times the amount the firm gave to any other single candidate.

On Wednesday, Wells Fargo, in a research note, said that disclosure documents show that Mylan has been "actively lobbying" in favor of a bill in the Senate that would mandate that all airlines, domestic and foreign, carry at least two packs of epinephrine auto-injectors. EpiPens are, by a large degree, the most commonly used devices of that nature in the United States.

Mylan has spent a reported $875,000 on lobbying so far this year, after having spent $1.55 million in 2015, according to OpenSecrets.org,

On Tuesday, CNBC noted how Bresch's company, in addition to hiking the price of EpiPen by double-digit percentage amounts ever since Mylan acquired the device in 2007, has also been sharply raising the prices of other products this year.

In a research note in June, Wells Fargo had highlighted the fact that Mylan raised prices by more than 20 percent on 24 products, and by more than 100 percent on seven products. They include prices for generic drugs for common conditions such as gallstones (up 542 percent), gastroesophageal reflux disease (up 444 percent) and irritable bowel syndrome (up 400 percent).

As a result of the company's financial performance, Bresch's compensation hit $19 million last year, up from $2.45 million in 2007. Over the same period, an EpiPen's average wholesale price was being hiked by 461 percent.


Last year, Mylan, whose main offices are in Pennsylvania, reincorporated in the Netherlands, in what Bresch said was a defensive move against a possible takeover, but which also lowered the company's tax liability. Bresch's senator father Manchin is on the record as being opposed to tax inversions.

Even after that tax inversion, Mylan argued to the FTC that it should be treated like an American company for the purpose of U.S. antitrust regulations, which would have made it tougher potentially for Israel-based Teva Pharmaceuticals to acquire Mylan.

Teva launched a hostile takeover bid in April 2015 for Mylan. Teva dropped that bid in July 2015, and months later Mylan failed in its own effort to buy generic drug manufacturer Perrigo for $26 billion.

"We know the inversion has invoked a lot of emotional and political banter but the reality is we remain a U.S. issuer under all of the formal and informal guidelines," Bresch told the Bloomberg news service at the time, in June 2015.

Bresch, who started as a data entry clerk at Mylan, was named chief operating officer in 2007. As STAT News noted Wednesday, at the time she was promoted to that position, Mylan pointed out that she had a Master of Business Administration from West Virginia University, which she claimed to have received in 1998.

In fact, a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette newspaper investigation in 2007 said school records indicated that Bresch had obtained just 26 academic credits out of the 48 credits required for an MBA.

The paper found that WVU awarded Bresch her degree retroactively in 2007, after initially telling the newspaper that she never received her degree, and after Bresch insisted she had. Manchin was the state's governor at the time. The school, which had received more than $20 million in donations from Mylan's founder, claimed that Bresch had "completed all the requirements" for an MBA, except for paying a $50 graduation fee.

However, an investigation panel set up at WVU — whose then-president was Bresch's high school classmate and former Mylan lobbyist Mike Garrison — found that "Ms. Bresch did not earn an MBA at West Virginia University."