The Antitrust Authority has sanctioned the pharmaceutical company Aspen with a fine of over 5 million euros. Aspen bought the patents (expired) of some anticancer drugs from GlaxoSmithKline, to produce them on their own.
After that he contacted the Italian Medicines Agency, threatening not to sell the drugs on Italian territory again if the prices had not been increased significantly, even if the drugs had no improvement. Eventually he got a 3- to 15-fold price increase for those drugs.
And precisely this increase is the cause of the fine, given that it has caused considerable economic damage to the National Health Service.
Aspen has its headquarters in Mauritius, but there is an Italian branch (Aspen Italia srl) with offices in Verona.
