A growing coalition that now includes all 50 state attorneys general, led by Connecticut’s William Tong, has expanded its massive price fixing and antitrust legal attack on general drug makers for the third time.
On Wednesday, the coalition, which also includes Puerto Rico, filed a lawsuit in Connecticut federal court against 26 generic drug companies — including Taro, Perrigo, Sandoz, Pfizer and Actavis — and 10 executives and other individuals, alleging a widespread conspiracy to artificially inflate and manipulate the prices of more than 80 generic topical drugs — creams, gels, tablets, ointments, pastes, shampoos and other products.
“These generic drug manufacturers perpetrated a multibillion-dollar fraud on the American public so systemic that it has touched nearly every single consumer of topical products,” Tong said in a statement. “Through phone calls, text messages, emails, corporate conventions, and cozy dinner parties, generic pharmaceutical executives were in constant communication, colluding to fix prices and restrain competition as though it were a standard course of business. But they knew what they were doing was wrong, and they took steps to evade accountability.”
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It’s the third such suit filed by states since 2016, but the largest yet in terms of sheer number of defendants and plaintiffs. The prior two suits remain pending in Pennsylvania.
Connecticut officials have been probing generic price spikes since 2014. The alleged collusion dates back to 2009.
The AGs filing the new suit said their allegations are built on “hard evidence from multiple cooperating witnesses, millions of records, and contemporaneous notes that paint an undeniable picture of the largest domestic corporate cartel in our nation’s history.”
Approximately half of the 26 defendant companies and several of the defendant executives named in the latest suit have been named in at least one of the two previous complaints.
