Monday, April 11, 2011

BNET: J&J Knew Of Bribery "Black Hole" For Years

J&J's Foreign Bribery Problems just keep getting, well, riper, & riper.

BNET has:

Internal E-Mails: J&J Knew Of Bribery "Black Hole" For Years

by Jim Edwards

Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) CEO William Weldon said the $70 million in foreign bribery settlements his company just made “are not representative of Johnson & Johnson employees around the world who do what is honest and right every day.” But J&J’s internal emails, plus the U.K. Serious Fraud Office’s records, indicate that J&J management knew as early as 1999 that it was making improper payments to Greek sales agents, and that money was disappearing into what it called a “black hole” in Europe.

Yet J&J later acquired the company that operated that “black hole” in order to maintain its illegal sales relationships in Greece, according to the SEC’s complaint. And although the SEC praised J&J’s cooperation in its probe, J&J took eight years to initially inform the SEC of its problems.

To give you an idea of the scale of J&J’s “not representative” activities, the violations occurred between 1998 and 2006 in Greece, Poland, Romania, and Iraq; and involved the following units of J&J: three units of medical device company DePuy, J&J Poland, Janssen-Cilag Europe, Cilag AG in Switzerland, and Janssen Pharmaceutica N.V. in Belgium. J&J paid “commissions” to various local agents of between 10 and 35 percent to do business in those countries.

Commissions or bribes?


And Here, you have to Go to BNET for the rest of Mr Edwards report. Click through, and put him on an RSS feed.

And remember, this Gilbert & Sullivan Opera called Johnson & Johnson Failed 48% of 161 FDA Inspections last year.

Thanks and a shout out for the heads up to Susan at If You're Going Through Hell Keep Going

No comments: