Alaska Attorney General Treg Taylor joined a coalition of 50 states and territories announcing two significant cooperation agreements and settlements with Heritage Pharmaceuticals and Apotex, totaling $49.1 million to resolve allegations that both companies engaged in widespread, long-running conspiracies to artificially inflate and manipulate prices, reduce competition, and unreasonably restrain trade for numerous generic prescription drugs.
“My office will aggressively pursue companies that collude to fix prices and engage in other conduct that results in Alaskan consumers paying illegally inflated prices for goods and services,” said Attorney General Taylor. “The allegations in these cases are particularly egregious. Alaskans paid more for generic drugs—including life-saving medicines—than they should have because of this conduct. I am committed to protecting Alaskans from bad actors, and any entity or individual contemplating engaging in the type of conduct outlined in these cases should know that they will be held accountable.”
As part of their settlement agreements, both companies have agreed to cooperate in the ongoing multistate litigations against 30 corporate defendants and 25 individual executives. Both companies have further agreed to a series of internal reforms to ensure fair competition and compliance with antitrust laws.
A motion for preliminary approval of the $10 million settlement with Heritage will be filed today in the United States District Court for the District of Connecticut in Hartford. A settlement with Apotex for $39.1 million is contingent upon obtaining signatures from all necessary states and territories and will be finalized and filed in the U.S. District Court in the near future.
The settlements come as the states prepare for the first trial to be held in Hartford, Connecticut.
If you purchased a generic prescription drug manufactured by either Heritage or Apotex between 2010 and 2018, you may be eligible for compensation. To determine your eligibility, call 1-866-290-0182 (Toll-Free), email info@AGGenericDrugs.com or visit www.AGGenericDrugs.com.
Alaska is a part of a coalition of nearly all States and territories filing three antitrust complaints, starting first in 2016. The first Complaint included Heritage and 17 other corporate Defendants, two individual Defendants, and 15 generic drugs. Two former executives from Heritage Pharmaceuticals, Jeffery Glazer and Jason Malek, have since entered into settlement agreements and are cooperating. The second Complaint was filed in 2019 against Teva Pharmaceuticals and 19 of the nation’s largest generic drug manufacturers. The Complaint names 16 individual senior executive defendants. The third complaint, to be tried first, focuses on 80 topical generic drugs that account for billions of dollars of sales in the United States and names 26 corporate defendants and 10 individual defendants. Six additional pharmaceutical executives have entered into settlement agreements with the States and have been cooperating to support the States’ claims in all three cases.
The cases all stem from a series of investigations built on evidence from several cooperating witnesses at the core of the different conspiracies, a massive document database of more than 20 million documents, and a phone records database containing millions of call detail records and contact information for more than 600 sales and pricing individuals in the generics industry. Each complaint addresses a different set of drugs and defendants and lays out an interconnected web of industry executives where these competitors met with each other during industry dinners, "girls nights out," lunches, cocktail parties, golf outings and communicated via frequent telephone calls, emails and text messages that sowed the seeds for their illegal agreements. Throughout the complaints, defendants use terms like "fair share," "playing nice in the sandbox," and "responsible competitor" to describe how they unlawfully discouraged competition, raised prices and enforced an ingrained culture of collusion. Among the records obtained by the States is a two-volume notebook containing the contemporaneous notes of one of the States’ cooperators who memorialized his discussions during phone calls with competitors and internal company meetings over a period of several years.
Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Northern Mariana Islands, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, U.S. Virgin Islands, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming, and Puerto Rico joined in today’s announcement.
Original source can be found here.