Teva will pay $450 million in the US to settle price-fixing lawsuits

The pharmaceutical company nature under the leadership of Richard Francis, closes another lawsuit against it for price coordination in the US. Teva will pay $450 million as part of the arrangements approved by the US Department of Justice, one in the amount of $425 million and the other in the amount of $25 million, without admitting guilt. The amount will be set aside over six years.

The first, the larger one, is about a lawsuit filed in August 2020 by the US Department of Justice against Teva – and other companies that operated in a similar manner – on suspicion of price coordination that resulted in overpayments of $350 million by American consumers. The suspicion, in this case, was that Teva helped charities to help patients to increase the use of the company’s flagship drug in those days, Copaxone, for multiple sclerosis. The way to do this, according to the prosecutor, was to get the patients to submit claims to the authorities and receive refunds from them, when the indirect result of this, apparently, was a sharp price increase in the field by the pharmaceutical companies. Thus, the price of Copaxone jumped to $85,000 per year in 2017, compared to $17,000 in 2006.

In the second case, of the 25 million dollars, it is about continuing allegations of price coordination in the generic drug industry. Already two years ago, Teva reached another similar settlement in this regard, when it reached a payment settlement of 225 million dollars and undertook to sell to another company Pravastatin, a generic drug aimed at reducing cholesterol and triglycerides. In addition, Teva pledged to donate two generic drugs, clotrimazole and tobramycin, to the charity, in the amount of 50 million dollars.

Teva strives to close many lawsuits

As you may recall, two years ago, Teva also reached a settlement in the opioid affair, the painkillers that led to the addiction and death of half a million people in the US. In that case, Teva agreed to pay compensation of $4.25 billion, of which $3 billion is in cash.

In recent years, Teva has been working to close many lawsuits, and has also been consistently reducing the high leverage it has since the failed purchase of Activis in 2015, the generic division of Allergan, as well as another purchase for a total amount of $40.5 billion, which led Teva to a huge debt, which it dropped after Then also the stock.

Since Teva’s announcement about the opioid compromise, two years ago, the stock jumped more than 170% and this year returned to being the largest company by market capitalization on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, leaving the other companies in the dust and now trading at a market value of NIS 75 billion – still, of course , very far from the record value, which was about NIS 250 billion.