On May 20, 1999, the media bomb detonated: The pharmaceutical multinational corporation Hoffmann-La Roche, BASF, Rhône-Poulenc and other multinational pharmaceutical companies admitted to have formed a so-called “Vitamin-Cartel” to conduct criminal price fixing for vitamin raw materials. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide were defrauded for almost a decade and had to pay higher vitamin prices because of this criminal activities. The US-justice departement declared that this Vitamin-Cartel was the largest cartel ever discovered and named it an economic „conspiracy“. Roche, BASF and the others cartel members agreed to pay almost a billion dollars in fines for committing these crimes.
While the magnitude of these fines made headlines around the world, the events that triggered the formation of this criminal cartel remained obscure. Until now. The background of this illegal Vitamin-Cartel is the scientific breakthrough documented in this book in relation to vitamins and prevention of cardiovascular disease. Already in the beginning of 1990 I informed the Swiss multinational pharmaceutical company Hoffmann-La Roche about these discoveries. On June 2, 1990, I send the summary of the discovery that heart attacks and strokes are – similar to scurvy – the result of vitamin C deficiency to Prof. Jürgen Drews, head of Roche research world-wide and member of its executive board.
Roche is the world’s leading manufacturer of vitamin C raw material. The Roche executives realized immediately that my discovery will boost their international demand for vitamin C and create a multi-billion dollar market for vitamin C and other viatmins. In order to get further information from me, the executives of Hoffmann-La Roche signed a confidentiality agreement and invited me to represent the new understanding of heart disease at their global headquarter in Basel, Switzerland. However, Roche decided not to promote this medical breakthrough, despite the fact that they acknowledged it as a breakthrough. The reasons they gave to me in writing: Roche did not want to finance the dissemination of this understanding of heart disease for all their competitors and they did not want to compete with other in-house pharmaceutical drug developments, such as cholesterol-lowering drugs.
Thus, while they refused to promote this medical breakthrough that could have saved millions of lives, this pharmaceutical companies turned around and decided to conspire in form of a vitamin Cartel in order to take advantage of this medical breakthrough anyway. Roche apparently invited BASF, Rhone-Poulenc, Takeda and other manufacturers of vitamin raw materials to criminal price fixing on a global level. The fraudulent profits these companies made from their criminal practices are estimated over 100 billion dollars over the past ten years. Compared to that, the fines these companies had to pay are nothing less than peanuts.
Not only the US government should receive compensation for the damage these companies have done, but vitamin companies and above all consumers world-wide should sue these companies in class action law suites all over the world. This is even more urgent, since these companies have harmed millions of people twice: First, they refused to promote and disseminate the live-saving information on the use of vitamins in order to prevent heart disease, thereby causing millions of heart patients to die unnecessarily over the past ten years. Second, they caused financial damage to literally every vitamin consumer on earth.
My correspondence with the Roche executives also proves the statements by Hoffmann-La Roche as a lie that the leadership of Roche did not know about these criminal activities. The opposite is now clear: The executives of Roche, BASF, Rhône-Poulenc and others did not only know about these crimes, they were the organizers. The mangers responsible for these crimes up to the highest levels of these companies have to be prosecuted and held responsible for their actions. But already today everyone can call those companies and their leadership as criminals, who distinguish themselves from a street robber only by the magnitude of their crimes. The criminal activities of this vitamin Cartel have opened millions of people the eyes even further about the „business with disease“ maintained by the pharmaceutical industry. The scandal of the vitamin Cartel has only just begun but it has already become another major nail in the coffin of the pharmaceutical industry.
© 2001 Matthias Rath Publishing Inc.
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