The long-awaited restructuring plan filed by Stamford’s Purdue Pharma on Monday drew fire from state Attorney General William Tong and other top legal officials nationwide, who said the OxyContin maker needs to do much more to atone for its actions.
“We are disappointed in this plan. While it contains improvements over the proposal that Purdue announced and we rejected in September 2019, it falls short of the accountability that families and survivors deserve,” Tong said. Connecticut joined with 22 other states to denounce the proposed restructuring.
Under the plan filed on Monday, Purdue would be converted into a new company that would direct all profits toward fighting the opioid epidemic, which was sparked in part by marketing of OxyContin. The Sackler family, which runs Purdue, would pay $4.3 billion of their own funds to reimburse states, cities and others that incurred costs due to the opioid crisis.Â
Tong and the other AGs called for changes to the plan that would allow for the extraction of “additional value” from Purdue’s founders and would ensure that the company in its current form to be wound down in a way “that does not excessively entangle it with states and other creditors.”
“We are committed to working with all parties in the bankruptcy to improve this plan and serve our constituents. Our focus remains delivering critically needed assistance to the people of our states,” the attorneys general said in a statement. They also called for the company to release more documents relating to its actions around opioids.
The company’s creditors and a New York bankruptcy court judge must approve the latest restructuring plan for it to go into effect.
Purdue Pharma filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2019 after it was targeted in a flood of civil litigation that was costing the company up to $2 million a week in lawyer’s fees, according to the New York Times.
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