Pfizer to pay out $93m to end antitrust suit
US pharma firm has not admitted liability as part of agreement with Lipitor buyers following a long-running dispute over a cholesterol drug | Litigation against Sun Pharma’s Ranbaxy will continue.
Pfizer has reached a “fair and reasonable” agreement that includes a $93 million payout to settle antitrust litigation spanning a decade regarding its cholesterol-lowering drug Lipitor.
The agreement was disclosed on Wednesday (February 14) in the US District Court for the District of New Jersey, by attorneys for a number of Lipitor purchasers.
In 2012, Pfizer was accused of engaging in an anti-competitive scheme with Ranbaxy Laboratories—an India-based pharmaceutical company acquired by Sun Pharma in 2015—to delay market entry of a generic version of Lipitor.
Retailers and distribution companies alleged that an agreement between Pfizer and Ranbaxy amounted to Pfizer compensating Ranbaxy for staying out of the Lipitor market until an agreed-upon entry date of November 2011.
They accused the firms of engaging in “sham litigation” and said the alleged scheme deprived them of cheaper versions of Lipitor, and resulted in overcharges of close to a billion dollars, according to law firm Cohen Milstein which represented the end-payer class of plaintiffs.
Multi-class, multidistrict litigation
Pfizer has not admitted liability as part of Wednesday’s agreement, and said in a statement that the allegations were “factually and legally without merit”.
The $93 million settlement was “fair, reasonable and the best way to resolve this litigation”, the US multinational went on.
The distributors’ case against Ranbaxy will continue, Reuters reported. There was no immediate response to a request for comment from Sun Pharma.
Lipitor (atorvastatin) is a statin medication prescribed to lower cholesterol and reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke, introduced by Pfizer in 1997. In its heyday, it achieved sales of more than $12 billion a year for Pfizer.
At one stage, the multi-district litigation over Lipitor involved four groups of plaintiffs—a proposed class of direct purchaser plaintiffs, several opt-out groups of direct purchaser plaintiffs, a proposed class of end-payer purchasers and a group of pharmacist plaintiffs.
In 2020, a New Jersey federal judge ordered that all plaintiff cases be consolidated as In Re Lipitor Antitrust Litigation, according to Cohen Milstein.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs were reported to be seeking around $31 million in legal fees from the settlement fund.
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