The Paris public prosecutor's office has given its requisitions in the area of “conflicts of interest” to the trial of the Mediator health scandal. On Wednesday, the prosecutor asked for fines and suspended prison terms against former executives and experts from the health authorities.
In this section, which concerns facts of “illegal taking of interests” and “revolving door”, nine people are prosecuted before the criminal court, as well as four companies of the pharmaceutical group Servier, for “complicity” or “concealment”. Some experts sat on commissions ruling on the Mediator while being paid as consultants by Servier, other defendants had become salaried employees of the laboratories soon after having left their functions within the health authorities.
An "exemplary sanction" against "elites"
At the end of her indictment, the prosecutor Cristina Mauro asked for an “exemplary sanction” against these “intellectual and scientific elites” who provided “strategic advice” to Servier when they should have “made sure that ineffective medicines, dangerous, don't stay on the market. ” The prosecution requested in particular a suspended sentence of two years in prison and a fine of 30,000 euros against Jean-Michel Alexandre, former grand lay of pharmacology and senior executive of the Medicines Agency, now "personal advisor From Servier just after he left.
Our file on the Mediator
Sentences ranging from one to two years in prison, suspended with fines, were required against the other defendants. According to some, the prosecution also asked for a ban on all activities related to medicine for five years. Against the four companies in the Servier group, the prosecutor sought fines ranging from 375,000 to 1.875 million euros, for a total of almost five million euros.
8.2 million euros in fines in the main stream
For the accusation, the "strategy of influence" of the Servier group with the health authorities explains "in part" the late suspension of the marketing of the Mediator, decided in 2009, fourteen years after first alerts on its dangerousness. Prescribed to approximately five million people during the 33 years of its marketing as an adjunct to the treatment of diabetes, the Mediator, which has been widely used as an appetite suppressant, is held responsible for hundreds of deaths.
In the main part of the case, one of the worst French health scandals, the public prosecutor's office on Tuesday evening demanded criminal fines amounting to 8.2 million euros against six companies of the Servier group prosecuted for “aggravated deception”, "Scam" and "manslaughter and manslaughter". This amount is raised to 10.228 million euros with the fines required for involuntary injuries without ITT.
The prosecution also demanded five years of imprisonment, including three years, and a 200,000 euro fine against the former number 2 of the Jean-Philippe Seta group, and a 200,000 euro fine against the Medicines Agency.
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