Attorney General Mark Herring joined Connecticut Attorney General William Tong and 41 other states today in releasing the full, unredacted complaint against Teva Pharmaceuticals and 19 of the nation’s largest generic drug manufacturers after the court granted the states’ motion to unseal the complaint.
Among the evidence now public are emails between generic drug manufacturers coordinating their response to a congressional inquiry, emails enforcing “fair share” and “playing nice in the sandbox” market allocation, “fluff pricing” strategy and other brazen coordination to artificially inflate prices, hinder competition and unreasonably restrain trade across the industry.
The lawsuit was first filed last month in U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut.
“The allegations in this unsealed complaint show the shocking lengths that these drug manufacturers went to in order to hide their price fixing plans, mislead Congress and even destroy evidence,” said Attorney General Herring. “What these companies did – inflating generic drug prices and forcing hardworking people to pay much more for the drugs that they rely on – is unconscionable. The public needs to see just how brazenly these companies worked to line their own pockets without any regard for the people they would be harming in the process.”
The complaint is the second to be filed in an ongoing, expanding investigation that the Connecticut Office of the Attorney General has referred to as possibly the largest cartel case in the history of the United States. The first complaint, still pending in U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, was filed in 2016 and now includes 18 corporate defendants, two individual defendants, and 15 generic drugs. Two former executives from Heritage Pharmaceuticals, Jeffery Glazer and Jason Malek, have entered into settlement agreements and are cooperating with the Attorneys General working group in that case.
In addition to Virginia, Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Puerto Rico joined the suit.
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