This seems interesting.
It was his dream job. He never thought he'd be bribing doctors and wearing a wire for the feds.
July 7, 2020, 2:00 AM
It was his dream job. He never thought he'd be bribing doctors and wearing a wire for the feds.
When Oswald Bilotta landed his dream job as a sales representative for Novartis Pharmaceuticals in 1999, he thought he'd be doing good for society while doing well for himself and his family.
He had no idea that just over a decade later, he'd be part of a vast federal investigation into kickbacks at Novartis and that he'd be paying cash bribes to doctors while wearing a wire for prosecutors.
On July 1, Ozzie Bilotta's yearslong effort to blow the whistle at Novartis paid off. The Justice Department announced a $678 million settlement with the company over improper inducements it made to doctors to prescribe 10 of the company's drugs, including the anti-hypertension drug Lotrel. The deal represents the biggest whistleblower settlement under the federal anti-kickback law, Bilotta's lawyer said.
"I felt like you needed to take drastic action to turn this system upside down and make it more legit," Bilotta, 57, said in an exclusive interview with NBC News. "The whole system needed to be blown up and pieced together in a fair way — fair for taxpayers and good for patients."
Although the payout Bilotta will get under federal whistleblower laws hasn't been determined, he could receive a pretax sum of $75 million through the settlement, his attorneys said.
In the settlement, Novartis admitted to "certain conduct" alleged by the government and will sharply curtail practices exposed by Bilotta that gave doctors incentives to prescribe its drugs. Novartis derived at least $40 million as a result of the conduct, money that was paid by federal health care programs, the government said.
"For more than a decade, Novartis spent hundreds of millions of dollars on so-called speaker programs, including speaking fees, exorbitant meals, and top-shelf alcohol that were nothing more than bribes to get doctors across the country to prescribe Novartis's drugs," said Audrey Strauss, the acting U.S. attorney for southern New York, whose office prosecuted the case.
Chief Executive Vas Narasimhan said in a statement that Novartis is committed "to resolve and learn from legacy compliance matters. We are a different company today — with new leadership, a stronger culture, and a more comprehensive commitment to ethics embedded at the heart of our company."
A Novartis spokesman declined to comment on Bilotta.
Bilotta, a Novartis sales representative for the eastern end of Long Island, filed his suit in January 2011 under the False Claims Act, detailing remuneration to physicians, such as lavish dinners at restaurants; costly tickets to sporting events and entertainment, including a trip to a Manhattan strip club; gift cards; and catering for events in the lives of doctors' children, such as graduations or bar mitzvahs.
On behalf of the government and to prove his case, Bilotta secretly recorded himself making cash payments to two doctors and got confirmation from four others of having accepted prior remuneration.
The government and New York state took up his case in 2013. It covers activities at Novartis that took place from January 2002 until November 2011. In addition to Bilotta's evidence, the government interviewed 350 witnesses, he said. The anti-hypertensive drug Valturna and the anti-diabetes drug Starlix were among the 10 or so drugs involved in the kickbacks.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/dream-job-never-thought-hed-090009506.html