BARI – The Court of Auditors of Puglia sues the defendants in the criminal trial on the alleged fraud of 20 million euros to the National Health Service, the so-called 'Farmatruffà. The summons tends to recover sums of millions of euros relating to the alleged tax damage caused to the public coffers.
In February 2013, the Bari Court of Appeal declared that there was no need to proceed due to the statute of limitations of the crimes charged against 77 defendants. Some of them challenged the sentence by appealing to the Cassation to obtain acquittal on the merits and those proceedings are still pending. In relation to those, most of the defendants, who instead did not challenge the statute of limitations, the Court of Auditors started the accounting procedure.
The first summonses were served in recent days. A Bari pharmacist was sued for 60 thousand euros but the total damages that will be requested by the accounting judiciary against dozens of professionals would be several million euros.
In the first instance, on 14 October 2010, the judges had imposed 78 sentences ranging from 7 years to 6 months of imprisonment and the payment of compensation for damages to the plaintiffs, including the Puglia Region, the Order of Doctors and Pharmacists, the local health authorities of Bari, Lecce and Brindisi.
According to the indictment, area managers and scientific informants of pharmaceutical companies, general practitioners and pharmacists, through false prescriptions, would have pocketed the reimbursement money for drugs costing up to 400 euros per pack which would then end up in the trash. The only institution to have obtained an immediately enforceable provision for an amount exceeding 600 thousand euros was the Puglia Region which, in the context of the proceeding on the legal liability of pharmaceutical companies, had also obtained compensation equal to 3.2 million euros (acquired from the regional budget).
With the second-instance ruling which declared the prescriptions by revoking all the provisional payments granted by the first-instance judges, the regional Attorney's Office and the Health Policies Area are now verifying the possibility of taking any new compensation actions, not before - regional sources know - having consulted the Regional Prosecutor's Office of the Court of Auditors "which, as far as is known, has already started and is starting autonomous damages actions, to avoid duplication of requests for compensation".
