The former director of a Saigon-based pharmaceutical company has been sentenced to 12 years in prison for his involvement in smuggling cancer medicine into Vietnam.
Dan Tri reports that Nguyen Minh Hung, who previously ran VN Pharma JSC, received the 12-year sentence for both smuggling and the falsification of documents. A number of former staffers at the company were also sent to jail, while Vo Manh Cuong, director of the H&C International Trading Shipping Company, received a 12-year sentence for importing the drugs. The sentences were handed out at the end of a week-long trial in Saigon.
The illegal activity began in May of 2014 when Saigon's Health Department awarded VN Pharma a contract worth roughly US$20 million to import cancer medicine.
Hung, the company director at the time, worked with Cuong to buy 9,300 boxes of H-Capita 500mg, a chemotherapeutic cancer drug from Canada's Helix Pharmaceuticals. Hung then ordered his staff to forge technical papers related to the medicine and to procure invoices in order to obtain an import license from the Ministry of Health, the news source shares.
After the medicine was imported, the ministry began to doubt its origins, and asked VN Pharma to explain. The company failed to do so, and ministry's Drug Administration examined the medicine, only to realize that it was not approved for human use.
Moreover, according to VnExpress, police investigation also showed that Helix Pharmaceuticals Inc. isn't a real company and VN Pharma also forged Canadian-issued certificates and the signature and stamp of the Vietnamese Embassy in Canada as proof of its existence. The real origin of the drug remains murky.
Ngo Anh Quoc, VN Pharma's then-vice director, had alledgedly bribed doctors at local hospitals to prescribe the medicine to cancer patients.
Hung, the former director, had also told his staff to forge contracts with a Hong Kong company in order to import medicine worth over US$220,000.
The sprawling conspiracy has also caught up to Vietnam's Health Minister, Nguyen Thi Kim Tien, who is at the center of rumors that she received an expensive villa from VN Pharma in exchange for her cooperation in letting them import the medicine in question.
In a separate article, Dan Tri reports that Tien has strongly denied any connection to the scandal. "No one in my family works for the company at all," she said. "This is a small private company so I even did not know [sic] about this until the Drug Administration informed the ministry of its doubts about the company's cancer medicine origins."
[Photo via Nha Quan Ly]
