Paris (AFP)

"What do you think a conflict of interest is?" Judged in Paris at the Mediator scandal trial, former experts at the Medicines Agency accused of having been under the "influence" of Servier laboratories, have striven to reject any "suspicious" link with the firm.

Michel Detilleux hammered him at the bar of the criminal court Wednesday: "I was perfectly in the nails." This 77-year-old medical professor was a consultant for Servier while serving on a committee of the Medicines Safety Agency (the former Afssaps, which became ANSM in 2013), notably ruling on the Mediator.

The same facts are alleged against Bernard Rouveix, 73, heard, him, Tuesday by the court which judges them both for "illegal taking of interests".

Did they "inform" the firm about the Agency's internal positions and did they offer Servier a "strategy" on the Mediator, one of the drugs they were responsible for monitoring? "Never," exclaim the two defendants.

"Why would I have done it? I was not an expert on the Mediator," said Professor Bernard Rouveix, an infectious disease specialist. This antidiabetic widely prescribed as an appetite suppressant, he especially remembers that it was not "essential".

How then does he justify this document, internal to the group, according to which he mentioned a substance chemically close to the Mediator? "I fall from the wagon of apples! I never did that," says Professor Rouveix.

And this fax of June 2007 in which the Servier group asked him for "feedback on decisions concerning" the firm? "We found this at home, but I don't explain it, I never had a fax," he dodges.

In another note, he advised laboratories to remind doctors of the Mediator's "therapeutic indication".

"I don't see what harm I could have done," says Bernard Rouveix. Consultant to several laboratories, also a legal expert, he claims to have "never received a Servier ballpoint pen".

If he has never made any declarations of interests, it is because his "very indirect relationship" with Servier "did not appear to him as a major conflict".

- "Silly phrase" -

"Defender" of the declaration of interests, Michel Detilleux told him at Afssaps his "link" with the Servier laboratories. "A link," he insists, "not a conflict."

Expert in internal medicine, he became a consultant for Servier "in 1990-1991" for a "variable" remuneration - "30,000" annual euros, then "25,000". With rare exceptions, he never worked on "old drugs".

Twice however, he studied the Mediator, released in 1976 and withdrawn in 2009, held responsible for hundreds of deaths.

The court is particularly interested in this meeting report of 2000, concluding with the "convincing strategic proposal of Pr Detilleux" which explained how to "save" the Mediator.

"I am stunned, the word is weak", defends himself at the helm the expert, wondering if he made these comments and if the "anonymous" author of the report did not "want to be done lather ".

Before the investigators, he described his attitude as "not entirely in the nails". "It was a silly sentence," he said at the helm. Because, when he sat in committee at the Medicines Agency, he "always applied the rule of deportation" with regard to Servier products, namely "not to speak, not to take part in the vote", he asserts.

But did he come out of the room, wondered the president, when he was accused of having stayed during a commission in April 2007 to reassess the drug?

"I was entitled to stay", the exit rule not yet "formalized", says Professor Detilleux.

Listening to the recording of this session confirms his words: he was not asked to go out, he did not speak. It also allows us to hear experts and members of the Agency discuss at length the strategy to adopt regarding the Mediator, "chemically an appetite suppressant", after several "reports" of serious heart diseases.

Its marketing will not be suspended until two and a half years later. This late withdrawal meant that the ANSM was tried for "homicides and involuntary injuries", alongside the Servier laboratories.

Trial ends April 30.

© 2020 AFP