White-collar crime

By Reuben Guttman and Traci Buschner. Mr. Guttman is a Senior Fellow and Adjunct Professor at the Emory Law School Center for Advocacy and Dispute Resolution, and a partner at the firm of Grant & Eisenhofer where he heads the firm's whistleblower practice. He is a founder of the website, Whistleblowerlaws. Ms. Buschner is a Senior Counsel with Grant & Eisenhofer. Mr. Guttman and Ms. Buschner were lead counsel for the lead whistleblower, Meredith McCoyd, in U.S. ex rel. McCoyd v. Abbott Labs.

Abbott Labs has agreed to pay $1.6 billion dollars to settle criminal and civil allegations that it engaged in the unlawful marketing of its anti-epileptic drug Depakote.

The settlement arose out of a False Claims Act (FCA) case filed in the fall of 2007.  Whistleblower or "Relator" Meredith McCoyd, alleged that the company marketed Depakote to elderly nursing home patients and to children for purposes that had not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).  Ms. McCoyd also alleged that Abbott made misrepresentations about the safety and efficacy of the drug and paid kickbacks to doctors and others.

This case was not just about lost government dollars. It was about a company that placed money over medicine by marketing unlawfully to vulnerable patient populations. And we still don't know what the long-term consequences are for those patients who took Depakote as a result of marketing improprieties.

Unfortunately, Abbott is not the first pharmaceutical company to face allegations of unlawful marketing tactics. Astra Zeneca, Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer have all paid hefty fines following allegations of marketing derelictions.

Not long after the U.S. Supreme Court limited securities fraud lawsuits against a mutual fund’s investment adviser in its June 5 – 4 opinion in Janus Capital Group v. First Derivative Traders, Howard A. Fischer wrote that the decision may have left another avenue open to pressing a securities fraud claim.

Fischer, a senior trial counsel in the New York Regional Office of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), wrote for Thomson Reuters Accelus that the Janus opinion may have opened the door for actionable claims to be lodged pursuant to the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO).”

The New York Law Journal reports, however, that at least one federal appeals circuit has “rebuffed” an attempt by investors harmed by the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme to use a RICO action to recover some of their loses.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, Mark Hamblett for the Journal reports, held that the “RICO claim was precluded by § 107 of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1964, as the court adopted a restrictive analysis on the bar against RICO actions in securities cases.”

The Journal notes that Circuit Judge Robert D. Sack “said the scope of that bar is unsettled in the circuit, so the question was whether it bars all RICO claims involving the purchase or sale of securities “or only RICO claims in cases where that plaintiff could have asserted a fraud claim against the named defendant.”