Eight pharmacists were sentenced to Marseille on Monday fines on Monday for accepting advantages provided by Urgo Laboratories, in violation of the so-called “anti -ft” law. The pronounced fines vary according to the amount of the advantages received and vary from 6,000 euros, including 2,000 euros suspended, at 50,000 euros, including 30,000 euros suspended.
A survey conducted by the General Directorate of Competition, Consumption and the repression of fraud (DGCCRF) had discovered that urgo, in exchange for a resignation of discounts by pharmacies, offered, between 2015 and 2021, 76,000 objects to more than 8,500 pharmacists, or 40% of the profession.
The number of gifts amounts to 55 million euros: brand furniture, iPhone, curve television, electric bicycles, luxury watches, champagne bottles, relay boxes and castles for weekends …
“One day, a seller gave me a catalog on frozen paper” that shows the objects offered according to a system of cumulative points, a pharmacist for the northern neighborhoods, which he recognized “much naive” and having “entered the system” told the court to receive 50,000 euros of gifts.
“Practical developed”
Urgo had been sentenced in 2023 to a fine of more than 1.1 million euros, including 625,000 euros suspended and confiscation of more than 5.4 million euros. After this conviction, each prosecution had to deal with the cases of pharmacists in his responsibility, he continued the “perception of a health professional with advantages provided by a person who sells health products.”
In the office of the Marseille prosecutor, 215 pharmacists are affected and around thirty are prosecuted before the Criminal Court by gifts of an amount greater than 20,000 euros, prosecutor Marion Chabot explained. The others benefit from other procedures: warning, criminal composition, they declare themselves guilty. This anti-Gift law is an anti-corruption system, “said the magistrate.
The National Council of the Pharmaceutical Order, Civil Party, claimed a symbolic euro of damages. “When 40% of a profession leaves the rails of legality, this means that it is not fraud, but an elaborate practice that leads to blindness for certain phenomena of bargain,” Fedéric Georges argued, one of the pharmacist’s lawyers.
According to Défense, the decisions are very different according to the courts: exempt from pain in Avignon, a fine of 40% of the advantages collected in Bordeaux, a fine of 1,000 euros suspended in Amiens. In Le Havre, former Minister of Health Agnès Firmin Le Bodo, a pharmacist by profession, had been sentenced to a fine of 8,000 euros at the end of 2024, including 4,000 suspended.
Source: BFM TV
