After handing over $30 million in criminal penalties last summer, Glenmark Pharmaceuticals has agreed to settle with the U.S. government over claims it fixed the price on a popular cholesterol medicine.
Glenmark will pay the Department of Justice $25 million to resolve allegations that it "paid and received compensation" to rig prices, supply and allocation of customers with other drugmakers around the cholesterol med pravastatin.
In a press release, the Justice Department said Glenmark carried out the alleged price-fixing activities between 2013 and 2015.
The latest update in the antitrust case comes after Glenmark and fellow generics maker Teva last August admitted to running a pravastatin price-fixing scheme. As part of the deferred prosecution agreement (DPA), both companies agreed to fork over criminal penalty payments and divest their respective drug lines for pravastatin.
Glenmark’s $25 million settlement is separate from the $30 million criminal penalty it paid last year, the Justice Department said in its release.
Glenmark will pay out the settlement fee in six installments over five years, the company said in a filing (PDF) on the Bombay Stock Exchange. The company stressed that the agreement to resolve the claims isn’t an admission of guilt, “except to the extent already admitted by Glenmark” in last year’s DPA.
Under the DPA inked last year, the U.S. has agreed to defer prosecution and trial for a three-year period, after which the charges may be dropped if Glenmark adheres to certain terms such as "remedial measures" and divesting pravastatin.
Aside from Glenmark’s role in the case, Teva last summer confessed that one of its former employees conspired with competitors to hold off on contract bids and sales of certain drugs three times between 2013 and 2015. The scheme affected the markets for clotrimazole, tobramycin and pravastatin.
The Teva employee in question left the company in 2016.
The claims against Teva and Glenmark are part of a broader price-fixing probe that has also implicated companies like Mylan, Lupin, Sun Pharma and Sandoz. Since 2023, companies have gradually managed to settle with the U.S. or untangle themselves from the antitrust claims.
Last March, Sun and its subsidiary Taro Pharmaceutical agreed to settle for $75 million over their alleged roles in a “conspiracy among manufacturers” to charge unreasonably high prices for generic drugs. In a lawsuit around the alleged conspiracy, plaintiffs accused multiple drugmakers including Sun of using trade shows, industry dinners, golf outings and other events to collude and carve out each manufacturer’s “fair share” of the market.
Conversely, the Justice Department in July informed Viatris—the company created through the union of Mylan and Pfizer’s Upjohn unit—that former Mylan President Rajiv Malik was no longer a “subject of interest” in its generic industry antitrust probe.
Mylan was also let off the hook following the Justice Department’s decision, the company said earlier this year.
Elsewhere, companies like Sandoz and Apotex and others have also inked settlements related to the wide-reaching price-fixing claims.