Schering Plough to pay $435m fine

Schering-Plough has agreed to settle a dispute regarding its sales, marketing and clinical practices, it was announced today.

The pharmaceutical giant has agreed to provide a settlement of $435 million, subject to court approval, with the intent of resolving an investigation into its practices from the US Department of Justice and the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts.

Under the agreement, Schering-Plough will plead guilty to one charge of “conspiracy to make false statements to the government” and will pay a fine of $180 million for this. It will pay an additional $255 million to settle all civil aspects of the investigation.

Brent Saunders, senior vice president of global compliance and business practice, commented: “Since April 2003 when new management joined Schering-Plough and launched its Action Agenda to transform the company, we have made great progress in building an organization that puts business integrity at the centre of its work.

“With this agreement, we are putting issues from the past behind us. It is another step as we transform Schering-Plough into a high-performance competitor for the long term,” he added.

Mr Saunders continued that criminal activity at the company had occurred before Fred Hassan joined the company as leader of the management team in 2003 – a measure taken to bring “business integrity into the DNA of the company”.

CNN Money reports that Hassan has been seen as a successful addition to the company, raising company stock by 17 per cent since he took over. This compares to the one per cent gain observed in general by the drug industry over the same period.

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