The pharmaceutical group Menarini is accused of having defrauded the National Health Service for decades by supplying it with drugs at higher prices than due and thus receiving illicit earnings of at least one billion and 212 million euros (over 2,000 billion lire) from 84 to Today. On Thursday, the Nas carabinieri and the financial police searched the headquarters of the group, seizing assets worth one billion and 212 million euros on a mandate from the Florence prosecutor's office. The Aleotti family investigated
by FRANCA SELVATICI
The Menarini pharmaceutical group - first in Italy, fifteenth in Europe, thirty-fifth in the world - is accused of having defrauded the National Health Service for decades by supplying it with drugs at higher than due prices and thus receiving illicit profits of at least one billion and 212 million euros (over 2,000 billion lire) from 1984 to today. It is the result of an investigation which began in 2008 with the discovery of the now famous deposit at the LGT bank in Liechtenstein of 476 million euros attributable to the family of Alberto Aleotti, the owner of the Menarini Group: a protagonist of Italian entrepreneurship under whose leads the pharmaceutical group has gone from a few hundred to almost 13,000 employees worldwide and in 2009 achieved a consolidated turnover of 2 billion and 797 million euros, which still today, at 87 years old, continues to be talked about. Yesterday the Nas carabinieri, the officials of the Revenue Agency and the investigators of the Guardia di Finanza notified him of a seizure decree of assets issued by the investigating judge Michele Barillaro - at the request of the prosecutors Luca Turco, Ettore Squillace and Giuseppina Mione - for a value equivalent to the amount of the disputed fraud, i.e. one billion and 212 million.
According to the accusations, through corporate operations developed at an international level, Menarini has inflated the prices of medicines to the detriment of the National Health Service, has established huge black funds abroad and has defrauded the tax authorities. Alberto Aleotti is accused of criminal association aimed at money laundering and numerous tax crimes with 13 other people, including his children Lucia and Alberto Giovanni, some employees and collaborators and the managers of the Verga Group of Lugano, which specializes in international shipments. Personally, Aleotti is accused of having organized a colossal scam against the National Health Service by cheating on the prices of some active ingredients, i.e. the raw materials with which the drugs are manufactured: Pravastatin, Fosinopril, Proline - Captopril, Aztreonam, Omeprazole, Cefixime, Myocamycin. The scam was allegedly carried out by building a fictitious commercial structure made up of "letterbox companies" (paper companies) and interposing it between the Menarini Group and the large international pharmaceutical companies that hold the patent rights on the active ingredients: Bristol Myers Squibb, Meiji Seika Pharma International, Astra Zeneca Ab and Fujisawa Pharmaceuticals. According to the allegations, it was the companies holding the patents that supplied Menarini but the invoices were issued by the fictitious companies at higher prices. In this way - the investigators argue - the pharmaceutical group deceived for years the Ministry of Health and the drug price commission, which established the selling prices of medicines based on the fraudulently increased prices of raw materials, with the advantage also for foreign industries which produce drugs with the same active ingredients, and with enormous disadvantage for citizens and for the national health system.
The immense profits thus made by Menarini were laundered, according to the allegations, by the children
