The company announces cuts. At the origin of the crisis there would be the decree of the ministry of health which required the name of the active ingredient and not of the commercial drug to be written in the prescriptions of family doctors
by MICHELE BOCCI
Menarini has a thousand redundant workers in Italy. This was announced today to the trade unions by the company's general manager, Domenico Simone, predicting a difficult season of cuts. One of the largest Italian pharmaceutical companies is in difficulty, again according to the manager, due to the August 15th rule which required family doctors to write the name of the active ingredient in the recipe and no longer that of the commercial product.
According to Menarini, the ministry's measure would be putting the entire drug industry in crisis. In recent days, Farmindustria has repeatedly sounded the alarm precisely regarding the risk of redundancies by companies. This even if for now the sales figures for generics do not seem to have grown particularly. The Florentine company declares itself in crisis, after all it puts many products on the market with expired patents, which therefore feel competition from generics. The redundancies would be both among informants and among employees.
The Aleotti family, owner of Menarini, had already announced their intention to leave Italy some time ago, when they ended up in an investigation for an alleged colossal fraud on the prices of drugs, which had led to the seizure of 1 billion and 200 million euros, contested by the Florentine prosecutor, which closed the investigation some time ago.
Last October 1, Menarini had requested a meeting with the Region to complain about the drop in sales. Subsequently, the councilor for productive activities Gianfranco Simoncini had written to the minister Corrado Passera to request government intervention. "While safeguarding the spending ceiling", wrote Simoncini, "we need measures to protect citizens' freedom of choice as well as the survival and development of the Italian pharmaceutical company, which is a quality industry and which must continue to represent a cornerstone of the development of our country". Simoncini, in agreement with Rossi, expressed «great concern for the productive situation in Tuscany as a consequence of the news on the collapse of the sales of pharmaceutical products with
