Whistleblower News From The Inside -- May 8, 2017

By the C|C Whistleblower Lawyer Team

Genzyme Corporation Pays $5.885 Million To Resolve False Claims Act Allegations; Judgment Involving Cases Against Nine Other Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Certified As Final Judgment, Allowing Appeal — Berger & Montague, P.C., joins co-counsel Faruqi & Faruqi, LLP in settling a whistleblower lawsuit against pharmaceutical manufacturer Genzyme Corporation for a total of $5.885 million.  This is the last in a series of four previously declined cases which Berger & Montague and Faruqi & Faruqi have successfully settled for a total of over $60 million dollars. Mr. Streck brought suit in 2008 under the Federal False Claims Act (“FCA”) and various State False Claims Acts.  The lawsuit alleged that Genzyme treated millions of dollars in payments to wholesalers as “discounts,” when in fact the payments were for bona fide services rendered. By treating the payments as discounts, the manufacturers reported lower average manufacturer prices, which consequently led them to pay less in rebates to state Medicaid programs. Mr. Streck’s suit was the first of its kind, in that the alleged fraud scheme had never been revealed in any prior lawsuit or government enforcement operation. PR Newswire

8th Circ. Tosses FCA Suit Over Drug Price Inflation — The Eighth Circuit on Friday upheld a Missouri federal court’s dismissal of a whistleblower’s False Claims Act suit against CSL Behring LLC and units of Express Scripts Inc. and CVS Caremark Corp., finding the allegations that CSL inflated the reported actual wholesale prices of two protein-based therapies had been previously made public. The FCA’s public disclosure bar applies in cases like this where the allegations weren’t made explicitly public, but where enough publicly disclosed information can “set the government squarely on the trail” of the fraud and its participants, the three-judge panel said in a published opinion. Law360 

Pharmacist from Rochester Hills Sentenced on Drug, Fraud Charges — A pharmacist from Rochester Hills who operated two pharmacies in Detroit was sentenced today to more than four years in prison for his role in a fraudulent prescription drug scheme. Nadeem Iqbal, 56, ran the scam out of Krauzer’s Pharmacy, which did business as Friends Pharmacy, and Minal Pharmacy, according to the office of Acting U.S. Attorney Daniel Lemisch. Authorities said Iqbal admitted illegally distributing more than 222,000 dosage units of controlled substances and fraudulently obtaining at least $1,619,471.67 from Medicare. Detroit Free Press