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The appeal trial of the Servier laboratories, which marketed the Mediator, opens today in Paris. Already sentenced in March 2021, after a trial that lasted ten months, the pharmaceutical laboratory was tried again following an appeal from the Paris prosecutor’s office.
Servier laboratories are once again facing justice. The Paris public prosecutor’s office having decided to appeal the initial conviction of the laboratory, the latter is therefore retried in Paris, and the trial opens today, Monday January 9, 2022.
An initial conviction for “aggravated deception and manslaughter and manslaughter”
Antidiabetic widely marketed as an appetite suppressant, the drug Mediator, manufactured by Servier laboratories, is the cause of at least 500 deaths. In 2008, it was pulmonologist and whistleblower Irène Frachon who revealed the scandal linked to this drug.
In March 2021, following a long ten-month trial, including two for confinement in 2020, the court announced that Servier laboratories were fined 2.718 million euros for “aggravated deception and manslaughter and manslaughter“. The firm’s former number two, Jean-Philippe Seta, was sentenced for the same facts to a four-year suspended prison sentence and a fine of 90,600 euros. The Paris Criminal Court had ruled that they were “the authors of a fraud of a considerable and unprecedented scale, of which thousands of patients have been victims”, knowing that they “had, from 1995, enough elements to become aware of the mortal risks” related to this drug. But if the tribuna recognized dissimilations, he had not retained the fraudulent nature of the maneuvers. Thus, the offense of fraud had not been retained.
An appeal requested by the Paris prosecutor’s office
Following this partial release, the Paris prosecutor’s office decided to appeal on April 6, 2021. The prosecution’s requisitions had been much more severe.
In a press release issued by Servier a few days after this decision, the laboratory explains that as a result, it has also taken “the decision to appeal their convictions for the offenses of aggravated deception and manslaughter and manslaughter“. Which therefore explains the opening of this new trial, which could be held until the end of next June.
Six legal persons and one natural person will therefore be retried before the Paris Court of Appeal for fraud, deception, homicide and involuntary injury, as well as for fraudulently obtaining an administrative document.
“A burst of justice” hoped for by Irène Frachon
Questioned by our colleagues from France InfoIrène Frachon still hopes that justice will be firmer in this case. “Is there going to be a burst of this justice? This is obviously what I call my wishes” she says on January 8 on the air. She who says she is “stunned” by the fact that Servier “always be the major sponsor of scientific events“.
According to her, the laboratory is “a product of this system that nothing can undo. These links of interest, these conflicts, these influences, these networks of understanding, it is indeed the betrayal of the elites“considers the pulmonologist, who judges “despairing” that “even a drama [ayant fait des] thousands dead in France cannot undo this knot“.