Abbott chief exec ordered to hand over email records

pharmafile | April 14, 2010 | News story | Sales and Marketing Abbott, conduct 

A US judge has ordered Abbott to give prosecutors access to company emails, including those sent by chief executive Miles White.

The ruling is the latest development in an ongoing federal probe into alleged improper marketing by Abbott of its anti-seizure drug Depakote (divalproex sodium).

The company is suspected of marketing Depakote for agitation and aggression in the elderly in the State of Virginia, an indication it was not licensed for, and therefore against the law.

The  Attorney’s Office in Virginia began its investigation in November, and has seen Abbott resist demands for extensive email records covering the 1996-2008 period.

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The stakes are high, as federal prosecutors are clamping down on marketing abuses and imposing large fines. Pfizer was fined a record $2.3 billion last September after being found guilty of extensive illegal marketing of its painkiller Bextra.

The Attorney’s Office pursuing Abbott wanted to see all correspondence of 13 people over the period, including Abbott’s chief executive Miles White, clearly looking for incriminating evidence. Abbott’s lawyers succeeded in reducing this to the emails of just three people – White, William Dempsey, former head of Abbott’s pharma division and Jeffrey Leiden who stepped down as president of pharma products group in 2006.
 
Abbott argued that retrieving the thousands of emails would be ‘unreasonably burdensome’, but District Judge Samuel.G Wilson sided with prosecutors and ordered Abbott to turn these e-mails over.
 
Judge Wilson commented in a written statement:  “The government has indicated that it has evidence that the off-label marketing of other FDA-approved drugs may have followed a similar pattern to the off-label marketing of Depakote.”
 
Wilson added: “If this is so, the off-label marketing of these other drugs may raise the same related health-care fraud issues that the marketing of Depakote raises.”
 
Both the federal and state authorities have targeted off-label marketing in recent years as such activities “unduly inflate drug-reimbursement costs” for government funded Medicaid programmes.  
 

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