The Florence prosecutor's office put it on paper, accusing the two industrial giants of having marketed drugs for over twenty years at higher costs. A billion euro scam that from 1984 to last year would have made families spend much more than expected for medicines put on the market
Forty-seven pages full of details, figures, invoices and correspondence which, according to the Florence prosecutor's office, testify to more than twenty years of drugs marketed at inflated prices, of scams in which the only ones to gain were two international pharmaceutical giants with strange names: the Italian Menarini and the US Bristol Myers Squibb. Probative elements collected and carefully studied by the Florentine magistrates to motivate the request for commissioner of the Bristol Myers Squibb Ltd, the Italian branch of the US company that got into trouble for aggravated scam with its president, Guido Porporati, and of the Menarini group led by Sergio Alberto Aleotti. Aleotti, 88 years old (already under investigation with fourteen other people and five companies "in business" with his family) would be placed at the top of an illegal system linked to people, still under investigation, of the Bms srl.
While the ruling by the judge for the preliminary investigations on the receivership of Bristol Myers Squibb srl is expected on 19 September, in recent days the Florence prosecutor's office revoked the request for receivership for Menarini, as announced by the chief prosecutor Giuseppe Quattrocchi, after the multinational paid the Revenue Agency, as partial compensation for the damage caused to the State, almost 372 million (371,983,315.20 euros to be exact). Therefore, part of the dispute with the state has been closed for the company, while the patron Aleotti had already written an end to the trouble with the tax authorities on June 29, closing his personal dispute on the basis of 324 million.
Wednesday morning the deputy prosecutor Luke Turkish, owner of the survey with colleagues Ettore Squillace Greek and Josephine Mione, listened to a person “informed about the facts”: to outline the passages and the alleged favors that revolve around the “hidden compartment” of Menarini and which also involve Bms srl through a second hidden sector, even more restricted, which according to a qualified source of the prosecutor's office “would concern three, four people at most”.
On the request for receivership of Bristol Myers Squibb srl, the investigating judge will pronounce himself on September 19th. His choice will condition the future of the pharmaceutical giant, a world-class company, listed on the New York Stock Exchange, with approximately 35,000 employees and production plants on all continents. This company, according to the allegations, was for years an accomplice in an unprecedented fraud estimated at over one billion euros and allegedly attempted, with Menarini (the alleged author of a 1 billion and 200 million "hole" in the National Health Service), "to influence the process of determining the price of medicines in Italy". Not to mention the fact that everything, from 1984 to last year, would have made families spend much more than expected for medicines placed on the market
