Vas Narasimhan, CEO of Novartis

Greece goes on of­fen­sive against No­var­tis, fil­ing a law­suit in af­ter­math of bribery scheme

Two years ago, No­var­tis got slammed with hun­dreds of mil­lions in fines from the US De­part­ment of Jus­tice for en­gag­ing in bribery and mis­con­duct in or­der to boost sales in dif­fer­ent coun­tries.

Now, one of those coun­tries, Greece, is on the of­fen­sive — is­su­ing a state­ment Fri­day that the gov­ern­ment is com­mit­ted to claim­ing com­pen­sa­tion from the Swiss mega-phar­ma.

The state­ment, orig­i­nal­ly in Greek from health min­is­ter Thanos Plevris, in­clud­ed a few spe­cif­ic ac­tions the gov­ern­ment was un­der­tak­ing, such as hir­ing a yet-named, US-based law firm and bring­ing a suit against No­var­tis for dam­ages. The Greek gov­ern­ment added that it was “tak­ing all mea­sures to hold No­var­tis ac­count­able and com­pen­sate the Greek state for its il­le­gal prac­tices.”

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