2023-12-20 19:43:48
After more than six months of trial, the Paris Court of Appeal ruled. The Servier group which marketed Mediator, a drug used as an appetite suppressant accused of having caused serious cardiovascular lesions, was sentenced this Wednesday, December 20 on appeal to a total fine of more than 9 million euros and to reimburse more than 415 million euros to social security organizations and mutual societies.
The pharmaceutical group was found guilty of all the offenses with which it was accused, including the offenses of “fraud” and “unduly obtaining marketing” for which it was acquitted at first instance. The Court of Appeal also confirmed Servier’s guilt for the offenses of “aggravated deception” and “homicide and involuntary injury”.
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“A huge victory for the victims”
In total, the six companies making up the Servier group were fined 9.173 million euros. Jean-Philippe Seta, former right-hand man of the all-powerful founder of the group Jacques Servier (died in 2014) and the only natural person accused in the appeal trial, was sentenced to 4 years in prison, including one year to be served under an electronic bracelet and a total fine of almost 90,000 euros. The court nevertheless did not follow the prosecution’s requisitions which requested the confiscation of Servier’s profits linked to Mediator, i.e. 182 million euros, arguing that this risked “endangering the group”.
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But, with regard to health insurance funds and mutual societies, the court ordered Servier to pay them the sum of more than 415 million euros for financial damage, more than one million euros for damage from disorganization and more than 5 million euros in procedural costs.
“This is a huge victory for the victims that I represent and defend since the first complaint in November 2010,” commented Charles-Joseph Oudin, one of the lawyers of the more than 7,000 civil parties who had formed for this extraordinary trial.
“A systematic policy of concealment”
During the detailed presentation of the judgment, the president of the court, Olivier Géron, stressed that the laboratory had “privileged its financial interest over the interests of patients”. Mediator, marketed in 1976 for the treatment of diabetes but widely misused as an appetite suppressant, has been prescribed to some five million people. It was withdrawn from the market in 2009, after a link with heart damage and pulmonary arterial hypertension was established by pulmonologist Irène Frachon.
There was “a systematic policy of concealment towards doctors who wondered about the Mediator”, affirmed Olivier Géron. The group “never took the necessary measures”.
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