Mexico City, June 24 (IANS/EFE) Six pharmaceutical companies were fined more than 150 million pesos ($11.6 million) for conspiring to raise the price of medicine they sold to a social-services agency, said Mexico’s anti-monopoly commission, the CFC.
The penalised companies had appealed an initial Feb 23 decision to impose the fine, but the full commission upheld that earlier ruling by a vote of 4-1.
No more appeals will be considered, the CFC said in a statement Wednesday.
According to the CFC, the companies engaged in monopolistic practices during public bidding processes organised by the IMSS. By colluding, they eliminated competition among them and forced the agency to pay artificially high prices for the medicine.
Eli Lilly y Compania-Mexico, Laboratorios Cryopharma, Probiomed and Laboratorios Pisa conspired between 2003 and 2006 to ensure a lack of competitive bidding for contracts to sell insulin, an essential medicine in the treatment of diabetes.
For their part, Pisa, Fresenius Kabi Mexico and Baxter engaged in anti-competitive collusion in their bidding for contracts to sell injectable saline solutions from 2003 to 2006.
The CFC imposed a 21.5-million-peso ($1.7-million) fine on each of these firms, the maximum penalty.
The CFC also slapped some 21 million pesos ($1.6 million) in fines on executives who ‘directly participated’ in the collusion.
The companies had argued in their appeal that there was no ‘illegal coordination among the companies’, and that each had taken ‘unilateral action’ based on expectations about how their competitors would bid, the CFC said.
But the CFC concluded that the pattern observed in the processes was that ‘the winning company increased its price in subsequent bidding to make way for another winner (which in turn submitted a bid that was similar to what had been offered by the winner of the previous round), something only explicable when there is collusion.’
