This article aims to try to place the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca in its legal / judicial context and in a broader and even moral way. The need obviously derives from the recent news that AstraZeneca is dealing with the production of the Covid-19 vaccine which, it should be remembered, is still being tested and of which the test results are in many respects doubtful.

We tell you right away that it is not a short article, on the contrary, but it is not our fault if AstraZeneca has also marked its long life in the name of scandals and convictions. We will start by listing the main controversies, convictions and most emblematic bargains of which we have sources for the most part journalistic. Already this could have been enough to place it in the constellation of pharmaceutical companies, but we preferred to deepen and in the second part instead we will list the convictions and plea deals, this time with links to the sentences, which took place in the United States since 2000. This second part will be more precise but less "emotional", in the sense that we can accurately tell you the numbers paid by AstraZeneca because if it is true that there is no database of "Big Pharma convictions", often the American Federal Government and the control bodies that sanction the offenses, they publish the judgments themselves in clear or at least the reasons through official press releases.

It should be remembered that every time you read "off-label use" of pharmaceutical products, for every serious violation, there are dead and damaged behind. These companies live for a single purpose, profit.

One thing is important: none of these companies could have committed these abuses if it had not had the connivance of doctors and scientists. Science and medicine save millions of lives but kill many more for the sole purpose of creating profit. We know that this claim is serious but it is a part of science and medicine that destroyed, perhaps irreparably, the trust relationship between citizens and doctors.

Disputes and convictions

Seroquel case

On August 16, 2007, Marcia Angell, a former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and a professor of social medicine at the Harvard Medical School, presents in an interview on Stern, a weekly German-speaking, a complaint that AstraZeneca scientists falsified their research into the efficiency of the drug Esomeprazole: "Instead of using supposedly comparable doses [of each medicine], the company's scientists used Nexium in higher dosages. They compared the 20 and 40 mg Nexium with 20mg Prilosec. With the cards having been marked this way, Nexium looked like an improvement, but it was only a small one and shown in only two of the three studies.
Nexium (esomeprazole) according to the authors is "at the top of the list" of drugs that are marketed by pharmaceutical companies directly to doctors, who receive gifts of money and / or goods when prescribing the drug in question. This behavior by AstraZenenca has resulted in an additional expense of 139,50 million dollars for the German public health system compared to the use of the "old" omeprazole which had the expired patent.^[8]

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Corporate sexual harassment

On May 13, 1996, Business Week newspaper reported sexual harassment cases involving 79 women against three Astra executives in the US, including CEO Lars Bildman.

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Case of ex-CEO Lars Bildman

Until June 1996, Lars Bildman CEO in the USA was accused of tax evasion for over $ 1 million, he had stolen corporate funds and hidden his actions from corporate executives, as well as allegations of sexual harassment made to female employees of Astra . The US company Astra has negotiated $ 9,8 million to close the sexual harassment lawsuit.

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Farmatruffa case

In 2007, involved with other pharmaceutical companies in the "farmatruffa" case, the company had to negotiate for 900 thousand euros to be paid to the National Health System. Their informants allegedly persuaded several doctors to make false recipes, some of which were also addressed to dead patients.
At first instance, on October 14, 2010, the judges had imposed 78 sentences between 7 years and 6 months of imprisonment and the payment of compensation for damages to the civil parties, including the Puglia Region, the Order of Doctors and Pharmacists, Asl of Bari , Lecce and Brindisi. According to the accusation, area chiefs and scientific informants of pharmaceutical companies, general practitioners and pharmacists, through false recipes, have pocketed the money for reimbursements for drugs that cost even 400 euros per pack which would then end up in the garbage. The only body to have obtained an immediately executive provisional amount of more than 600 thousand euros had been the Puglia Region which, in the context of the procedure on the legal liability of pharmaceutical companies, had also obtained a compensation equal to 3,2 million euros (acquired from the regional budget). With the second degree sentence declaring the prescriptions revoking all the provisional ones granted by the judges of the first degree, the Regional Advocacy and the Health Policies Area are now verifying the possibility of taking any new compensation actions, not before - Regional sources say - that they consulted the Regional Public Prosecutor of the Court of Auditors '' which, as far as we know, has already started and is initiating autonomous actions of damages, to avoid duplication of claims for damages ''.

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Shadows on the Nobel of Medicine "Piloted Award" 2008

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Tax dispute in the UK

The pharmaceutical company has agreed to pay 505 million pounds in a case involving the complex intercompany tax accounting system known as transfer pricing, which allows companies to record profits from a subsidiary in a high-tax area to one in a low-tax jurisdiction, minimizing tax payments. However, authorities are increasingly lowering transfer prices as part of an international tax avoidance offensive that has the backing of the President of the United States, Barack Obama.
AstraZeneca has stated that it makes over 70% of its profits abroad and pays the necessary taxes abroad. However, the American division of AstraZeneca was named in 2004 as one of the 30 companies involved in a tax avoidance plan sold by the US company KPMG. The scheme is estimated to have cost the US tax authorities, who called it "abusive", with lost revenue of nearly £ 1 billion.

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Marvecs Italy case

The prosecutors of Milan Gaetano Ruta and Luigi Orsi have requested the indictment for 23 people, including managers and advisers or former directors of the Italian divisions of the multinationals of the pharmaceutical sector Pfizer and Astrazeneca, all accused of fraudulent bankruptcy.
The investigation, conducted by the Tax Police Unit of the Gdf of Milan, had been closed in recent months and would have ascertained that a company operating in the marketing of pharmaceutical products, Marvecspharma Service srl (which went bankrupt in January 2011), after increasing its workforce due to some sales of business branches by the multinationals of the drug, Pfizer and Astrazeneca, and received by way of negative goodwill sums of more than one hundred million euros, has failed to pay into the closed-end fund of the category employees 'Pharmaceutical Scientific Informers' the related severance pay and withholdings made as substitute tax, for amounts greater than 12 million euro. The company, according to the prosecution, would also have purchased equity investments in associated companies for several tens of millions of euros and paid consultations of dubious nature and effectiveness, closing the various financial years always at a loss, until bankruptcy.
The trial request concerns Nicola Danzo and Francesco Danzo, arrested in July 2011 and to whom Marvecspharma Service srl and Ellenerre srl were connected, and a series of managers or former managers of Pfizer Italia (Per Oluf Olsen, Francesco De Pari, Marco Pacini, Martin Thomas, Maria Pia Ruffilli, Soren Celinder and Silvio Mandelli) and of Astrazeneca spa (Hans Sijbesma, Fausto Massimino and Luigi Felice La Corte).
According to the accusation, the managers of the two multinationals and of two other companies, Pharmacia Italia and Simesa, in competition with the managers of Marvecspharma Service srl, would have dissipated "the corporate assets" and caused "the failure" of this 'last company, through' 'malicious'' operations, in particular with the sale of company branches. A series of acquisitions that, according to the prosecutors, would have burdened the company "with bankruptcy charges due to workers and social security institutions for amounts that exceeded its capital capacity". The preliminary hearing is expected to be set for March. (HANDLE).

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Italy antitrust case

The president of the Italian antitrust commission in June 2013 in the usual annual report presented to parliament, it stigmatizes the dominant behavior of some pharmaceutical multinationals including AstraZeneca, underlining its behavior. The report confirmed the first instance judgment of the General Court in the AstraZeneca case and, consequently, the correctness of the initial Commission decision (the decisions of the Court of Justice, the General Court and the Commission are available respectively , promising, , promising e , promising). "The Commission drew attention to the prejudices to competition that can arise in this market through regulatory gaming, first with a fact-finding investigation and then with the decision on the AstraZeneca case, in which the abuse of a dominant position by a company that exploited the folds of regulation to illegally maintain an exclusive position. The decision was confirmed by the Court of Justice in December 2012. "
In addition to the amount of the sanction (a good 53 million Euros), the AstraZeneca case is of extreme interest for having definitively confirmed some obligations that affect all companies in a dominant position that interface with the patent offices. As is known, AstraZeneca's behavior deemed abusive had consisted in having communicated to some national patent offices, as a date corresponding to that of the first marketing authorization on European territory, a date subsequent to that of the first marketing authorization trade obtained in France for the drug in question (ie Losec, the branded drug of AstraZeneca based on omeprazole). This communication had not been corrected even afterwards, despite the fact that AstraZeneca had received requests for clarifications from some patent offices. On this basis, AstraZeneca had therefore obtained complementary protection certificates for omeprazole which - as the Commission considers - the competent patent offices would not have issued had they known of the existence of the previous French marketing authorization

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