A doctor and two drug company managers have been jailed in a bribery and prescription fraud scandal in Spain.
Luis Bahamonde-Falcón, manager of the pharmaceutical firm Kendall Institute, Barcelona, was found guilty of attempting to bribe numerous doctors to prescribe two of the company’s drugs, Inkamil (ciprofloxacin) and Kenesil (nimodipine).
He was also found guilty of instructing another manager, Agustín Mancheño-Llorente, the company’s agent in Madrid, to pay doctors their conference expenses and cash to carry out bogus follow up studies on the effects of these two drugs. Madrid’s provincial court last month sentenced both men to two years in jail.
Dr Rafael García-Bobadilla, aged 66, a primary care doctor, was sent to prison for four years for accepting bribes of at least £875 from Mr Mancheño-Llorente and for prescription fraud.
Dr García-Bobadilla and Mr Mancheño-Llorente together falsified at least 224 prescriptions. Dr García-Bobadilla wrote out prescriptions for Inkamil and Kenesil, in the name of patients who were pensioners (and therefore entitled to free drugs) but gave them to other patients who were not so entitled. The fraud cost the Spanish health system an estimated £8750.
Dr García-Bobadilla, who practised in Madrid, was also struck off the medical register for seven years. During the trial, Mr Mancheño-Llorente said that his task in Madrid was basically “to pay doctors” in order “to increase the sales of Kendall products.” He added that the company, to justify the payments, asked the doctors to perform “fabricated studies of pharmacological follow up,” which, according to Mr Mancheño-Llorente, was just a “more elegant” way of paying them. No such studies were done, the court was told.
The case was uncovered by inspectors of the national health service. The inspectors noticed that the doctor was prescribing an abnormally large amount of these drugs and decided to pass the case on to the court after they discovered that the prescriptions were all in the names of pensioners who had never asked for these products or gone to collect them.
The Kendall scandal started in 1996 when it was found that a suspicious relationship existed between 99 doctors and the company. Inspectors who were on the track of Dr García-Bobadilla found a list at the company’s office with the names of 99 doctors who had agreed to receive “undue incentives.”
To coincide with the BMJ’s theme issue, Embracing Patient Partnership (18 September), we surveyed website visitors about who should make treatment decisions. Over 850 people responded to our questionnaire, which ran from 17 September to 4 October. The results are shown in the table below.
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To coincide with the BMJ’s theme issue, Embracing Patient Partnership (18 September), we surveyed website visitors about who should make treatment decisions. Over 850 people responded to our questionnaire, which ran from 17 September to 4 October. The results are shown in the table below.