Greek Competition Authority Targets Novartis foGreek Competition Authority Targets Novartis for Alleged Exclusionary Behaviour on Market for Treatment of Macular Diseasesr Alleged Exclusionary Behaviour on Market for Treatm
- 30/08/2024
- News
The Greek competition authority (Hellenic Competition Commission or HCC) announced on 29 August 2024 that it issued a Statement of Objections (SO) against Switzerland-based Novartis and that firm’s Greek subsidiary on account of suspected exclusionary behaviour on the Greek market for the treatment of macular diseases (see, attached press release). The abusive conduct allegedly took place between 2009 and 2017 in two forms:
- First, Novartis supposedly paid physicians and healthcare institutions to prescribe its medicines at the expense of rival medicines. The payments reportedly took the form of benefits typical of the pharmaceutical industry such as reimbursed travel expenses for attending scientific conferences; cost of participating in epidemiological studies; and donations for scientific or social purposes.
- Second, Novartis allegedly also denigrated rival medicines with prescribing physicians and patients.
The HCC is scheduled to decide on 4 December 2024 whether there is any truth to the SO and, if so, whether Novartis should be penalised.
The second strand of the case is reminiscent of earlier cases against Novartis and others because of their anticompetitive efforts to thwart off-label prescriptions of Avastin® for the treatment of wet age-related macular degeneration for the benefit of Lucentis®, a medicine in the Novartis portfolio. One form of abusive conduct for which Novartis found itself in the crosshairs of the competition authorities was to discredit Avastin® and stoke fears over its use in the ophthalmological field. This led to enforcement action against Genentech, Novartis, and Roche in a series of Member States, including Belgium, Italy, and France (see, Van Bael & Bellis Life Sciences News and Insights of 25 January 2023, 9 September 2020, and 24 January 2018).
The first part of the HCC’s SO is remarkable in that the conduct of which Novartis stands accused, paying physicians to support scientific and social aims or to obtain specialist services, is often legal as long as the paying pharmaceutical firm does not seek to influence a physician’s prescribing behaviour. In challenging these payments, the HCC made an incursion on terrain normally occupied by pharmaceutical regulators and ethics panels of industry boards.
