The Sanofi pharmaceutical group is again targeted for hindering competition

The French pharmaceutical giant is suspected by Brussels of abuse of a dominant position concerning its anti-scrippal vaccines. Searches took place on Monday at the group’s headquarters in France and Germany on Monday.

Sanofi in the viewfinder of the authorities. The company is suspected by Brussels of abuse of a dominant position concerning its anti-grappal vaccines. The announcement comes a few days after a historic fine in France for the French pharmaceutical giant, in another case of obstacle to competition. The group announced on Monday September 29 to AFP that it was targeted by an investigation by the European Commission on “His behavior in the seasonal flu vaccine sector”.

Searches took place on Monday at the group’s headquarters in France and Germany, said Sanofi. He did not say more about it and warned that he would not communicate beyond this brief declaration, just promising to collaborate with Brussels and ensuring that he had respected the rules in force. For its part, the European Commission has hardly been soothed. In a statement published shortly before the Sanofi declaration, she specified, without mentioning the name of the group, that her investigations concerned a possible violation of the EU competition policy “which prohibits abusive use of its dominant position on the markets”.

If Brussels has taken care to specify that its searches do not mean at this stage that the group is really guilty of anti -competitive behavior, this announcement comes to complicate the table for Sanofi when it has just been condemned in France to a heavy fine in this area. French justice has enjoined him at the end of September on the appeal to pay 150 million euros in health insurance for anti -competitive practices around his anticoagulant Plavix.

No group has previously been sentenced to such damages to Social Security, apart from the French pharmaceutical laboratory Servier in the Mediator file, an antidiabetic used as an appetite suppressant, at the origin of one of the most resounding public health scandals in France. Sanofi, who is considering an appeal in cassation, is accused of having carried out a denigration campaign against generic versions of Plavix, at a time when this treatment would see his rights falling into the public domain in the early 2010s.