Published 14 July 2008, doi:10.1136/bmj.a814
Cite this as: BMJ 2008;337:a814

News

Prosecution over drug price fixing collapses

Clare Dyer

1 BMJ

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Five drug companies and nine directors accused of a multimillion pound conspiracy to swindle the NHS by fixing the prices of generic drugs are poised to escape criminal charges after a judge threw out the case against them, subject to appeal.

The eight year prosecution, which has cost taxpayers around £25m ({euro}31m; $50m), looks set to collapse after the ruling by Mr Justice Pitchford at Southwark Crown Court last week.

Operation Holbein, the largest prosecution ever handled by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO), accused the five companies—Goldshield Group, Kent Pharmaceuticals, Norton Healthcare, Generics UK, and Ranbaxy UK—of fixing the supply and prices of penicillin based antibiotics and the anticoagulant warfarin in the 1990s.

The SFO began investigating the allegations, referred to it by the Department of Health’s counter-fraud directorate, in 2000. In 2002 investigators made dawn raids at 30 addresses in England, Wales, and Scotland, and prosecutors alleged that . . . [Full text of this article]


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