An Indian lawyer has filed a lawsuit asking the Indian Supreme Court to investigate Ranbaxy Laboratories (Ranbaxy), its executives and Indian drug control officers, as well as to shut down two of Ranbaxy’s Indian plants.
It has all come as a result of the recent settlement agreement with the US Department of Justice, where Ranbaxy agreed to pay US$500 million in civil and criminal fines. The generics giant pleaded guilty to three felony counts related to the manufacturing of drugs at its Dewas and Paonta Sahib facilities that did not meet safety standards and to four counts of falsifying data.
Despite Ranbaxy facing charges in the US, the company has never faced any sanctions in its home country of India. Litigation lawyer Mr Manoharlal Sharma says that Ranbaxy ‘knowingly sold substandard drugs around the world, including in India, Africa and the US; while working to deceive regulators’.
The petition from Mr Sharma demands that the two plants involved in the US litigation be sealed immediately, a probe be carried out by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) into the US charges and criminal proceedings be brought against the executives who were at Ranbaxy when the fraud was unearthed.
Mr Sharma adds that ‘the same medicines manufactured at [the] Paonta Sahib and Dewas plants [were] being supplied in India for the last several years’ and claims that corruption and political nexus are the reasons why no action has been taken against Ranbaxy in India until now. For this reason, Mr Sharma has also sought a CBI probe against the drug control officers who overlooked these acts of omission.
And just when Ranbaxy thought it could not get any worse, Apollo Pharmacy – India’s largest pharmacy network with over 1,500 outlets – has temporarily suspended sale of medicines manufactured by Ranbaxy. The decision, which was taken by the group’s medical committee, has been announced as a ‘temporary’, ‘cautionary measure’, in order to ensure patients’ safety. The group has sent a questionnaire to Ranbaxy asking them to re-certify existing stocks and stated that ‘Apollo’s pharmacies would restart sale of Ranbaxy drugs after the company had fulfilled the requirements and satisfied the medical committee’.
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