ICN in Talks to Buy Polish Drug Company : Pharmaceuticals: The company’s push into Eastern Europe continues. Deals with four other drug makers in the region are also reportedly underway.

Milan Panic, the flamboyant founder of ICN Pharmaceuticals Inc., said Tuesday that the company is negotiating the purchase of one of Poland’s two top drug makers in its latest push into the emerging Eastern European marketplace.

The announcement that the firm is seeking to acquire Pharmaceutical Works, located in a suburb north of Warsaw, signals its intent to build a powerful, international drug conglomerate around the ICN family of companies.

Panic, who spearheaded the 1991 acquisition of 75% of the Yugoslavian drug manufacturing firm Galenika by ICN subsidiary SPI Pharmaceuticals, said Tuesday that at least four other deals to purchase Eastern European companies are in the works.

Costa Mesa-based ICN is negotiating the purchase of Oktyabr Pharmaceutical Factories near Moscow, and talks are ongoing with two unnamed Hungarian drug manufacturers and a Czechoslovakian firm, Panic said.

For his part in the ICN Galenika purchase, Panic has been richly rewarded.

He was paid more than $6.1 million in salary, bonuses and SPI stock in 1991, according to ICN Pharmaceuticals’ proxy report. That made him one of the highest-paid executives in Orange County for the year.

By comparison, Panic’s total compensation the year before as chairman and chief executive of ICN Pharmaceuticals and its three subsidiaries was $657,729.

And on Tuesday, SPI shareholders ratified a stock option plan that grants Panic the right to buy up to 400,000 shares of the company’s stock at $32.25 a share during the year.

While the stock closed Tuesday at $26.75 a share and did not trade as high as that option exercise price during 1991, Burke Trafton, an analyst with the Beverly Hills brokerage of H.J. Meyers & Co., said the shares could go a lot higher.