February was a ‘lively’ month in the pharmaceutical sector. GSK attracted yet another £37m fine for illegal practices on 12th February. Although a record-breaker in itself, as the largest fine ever to be handed to a drugs company by a UK competition regulator, for size, it pales into insignificance by their own standards, since they set the pharmaceuticals bar at the current record level of $3bn in 2012.1 Fines of a few million like this can be seen as simply a reasonable marketing cost, merely serving to uphold the seemingly true adage, in this field at any rate, that ’crime pays’. This time they got caught out for buying the inactivity of smaller companies that would otherwise have weighed in with cheap generic alternatives to a GSK blockbuster, once their patent had expired. By paying out £50m, they managed to ‘suppress’ any competition and keep the gravy-train rolling a bit longer.2 Seroxat sales in one year in the UK alone were £90m. How a fine of a mere £37m is proportionate for this, I fail to understand.
