More physicians, pharmacists suspected of illegal promotion of medicines to appear before court in Moldova

Chisinau, 14 May /MOLDPRES/ - Files on three pharmaceutical companies and nine physicians, suspected of illegal promotion of medicines, have been finished and submitted to court for consideration today. The Anticorruption Prosecutor’s Office made statements to this effect, noting that the health sector employees were prosecuted for abuse of power and extortion of money.     

The spokeswoman for the Anticorruption Prosecutor’s Office, Anastasia Mihalceanu, said that the health system employees were charged with applying a corruptible scheme, through which sales agents of pharmaceutical companies were agreeing with physicians from medical and sanitary institutions to promote their products.

According to Mihalceanu, representatives of pharmaceutical companies were used to identify physicians from medical and sanitary institutions and were persuading them, against illegal remunerations, to prescribe to patients certain medicines from stocks of drug stores. For their part, employees of medical institutions were indicating these preparations to patients, as well as the drug store where they can be purchased, contrary to physicians’ obligation to prescribe only the active substance and not the name of the preparation. In exchange of promotion services, medical employees were remunerated with various sums of money, goods or sponsorship of trips outside Moldova.   

Within searches, carried out in last February, more evidence relevant for the file was risen at some sales agents, including money and goods, meant for remunerating medical staff for the promotion of medical products. At the same time, law-enforcers also took lists with nominal record of the physicians involved in the network of medicines’ promotion, the medical institutions where they worked, names of preparations which were to be prescribed to patients, as well as the sums of money or goods which were to be given to physicians as remuneration.   

Representatives of the three pharmaceutical companies acknowledged their guilt and compensated the damage caused (worth 365,900 lei); thus, a special procedure will be applied against them and if found guilty, they run the risk of being fined with up to 57,500 lei or being punished with imprisonment of up to 3 year, with the deprivation of the right to hold certain positions for a period from two to five years.   

As for the physicians, four out of the nine accused people recognized their guilt and run the risk of being fined with up to 37,000 lei or being punished with unremunerated labour for the benefit of the community from 120 to 180 hours.

(Reporter A. Zara, editor M. Jantovan)