It will be impossible for the one hundred defendants to reach a sentence before 2010 - The nine accused manufacturing companies will compensate the State for around six million euros
The public prosecutor Ciro Angelillis has invoked the indictment, but the hypothesis that the case of the farmafraffa can be discussed in a trial is less and less concrete. Because the risk of prescription is much more than just a possibility. The crimes, charged by the prosecution to 126, including scientific informants, doctors and pharmacists, starting from 2010 will no longer be prosecuted. Too much time has passed and the preliminary hearing has not yet concluded. Yesterday, before the investigating judge Antonio Lovecchio, prosecutor Angelillis invoked the trial for the professionals involved in the investigation, which between 2003 and 2005 resulted in the arrest of doctors, pharmacists and representatives of the most important multinationals.
The accusation is of having caused a scam to the national health system of 20 million euros; the doctors, at the request of scientific informants who in return guaranteed gifts and prize trips, prescribed the recipes for expensive medicines. The pharmacists collected the punches and received reimbursement from the health system for each medicine that was promptly thrown into the garbage cans. "The phase of the disposal of drug packages - explained the investigating judge Chiara Civitano in one of the precautionary measures - is the one that arouses the greatest social alarm".
A six-zero scam for which, at least for criminal justice, there may be no culprit. The public prosecutor who coordinated the investigation reiterated the need for a trial, but the request for indictment had been filed in December 2005. Five months later, in May 2006, the preliminary hearing began (postponed for the passage of the first investigating judge to the magistrate´s office) will continue at least until June 2008. The defendants must choose between the abbreviated procedure and the ordinary one, a decision which they will communicate to the judge in the next eight hearings, which will precisely end in June . The times, therefore, are still long. It is almost impossible to imagine a definitive sentence on the case of the farmafraffa.
The statute of limitations on the episodes disputed in the investigation (many date back to 2000) starts in two years. Too little to instruct and conclude even a first degree process. In the preliminary hearing, the order of pharmacists, some local health authorities and consumer associations are filed as civil parties. Against those allegedly responsible for the round of false prescriptions, in the event that the statute of limitations of the crimes is recognised, they will be able to retaliate only in civil proceedings.
The investigation is based on wiretaps and documentary evidence. The Nas carabinieri and the municipal police officers recorded the conversations, the agreements that doctors and scientific informants made. And they documented the scam. The drugs, very often expensive anticancer drugs, were prescribed to patients who were completely unaware of the results or who had already died. The doctors and pharmacists, from the representatives of the best-known multinationals, were in exchange rewarded with money, with stays in exotic locations.
And if the statute of limitations is triggered for the crimes charged against 126 doctors, pharmacists and scientific representatives, the proceeding instead continues, with nine pharmaceutical companies in the dock: Bracco Glaxo, Biofutura, Bristol, Novartis, AstraZeneca, Lusofarmaco, Recordati and Pfizer. The prosecutor had requested the suspension of the commercial activity of the Italian branches, but eight multinationals
