Romania’s anticorruption prosecutors carried out searches at several local pharma companies, drug distributors, hospitals, and oncology clinics on Tuesday, July 28, as part of a corruption investigation targeting the prescription of cancer drugs based on arrangements between doctors and pharmaceutical companies.

According to the National Anticorruption Directorate (DNA), pharma companies offered doctors working in hospitals in the Mures, Salaj, Sibiu, Bistrita-Nasaud and Cluj counties various rewards for prescribing the drugs they produced or distributed, reports local Mediafax.

Companies paid for the doctors’ travels to international medical conventions as well as leisure trips to other countries. In 2014, a pharma company paid almost EUR 1 million to a tourism operator, as a “sponsorship” for doctors, which, in fact, was a bribe, according to judicial sources. Companies paid for doctors’ trips to San Diego, Las Vegas, and Paris, among others. The trips included visits to the Grand Canyon and hotel stays at the Bellagio in Las Vegas.

In return, the investigated doctors prescribed the drugs produced or distributed by these companies, instead of generic drugs, which are cheaper, but have similar effects. The scheme also artificially increased the number of patients who benefited from these expensive treatments and created unjustifiably high inventories of such drugs in some public hospitals, which damaged the National Social Health Insurance Fund, according to judicial sources, quoted by Mediafax.

Some 16 doctors who run oncology departments in state hospitals or coordinate parts of the national oncology sub-programme are under investigation, according to judicial sources.

Swiss pharmaceutical group Roche is also targeted by the investigators, according to the group’s representatives quoted by Ziarul Financiar. Cancer drug sales amount to some EUR 0.5 billion per year, according to ZF.

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editor@romania-insider.com