Distributors of a contaminated Indian cough syrup that killed 65 children in Uzbekistan paid local officials a bribe of US$33,000 ($45,000) to skip mandatory testing, Uzbek state prosecutors alleged during a trial on Wednesday.
The Central Asian nation put on trial 21 people, all of them Uzbeks except for one Indian, over the deaths last week, making public a much higher death toll than previously reported.
Three of the defendants are executives of Quramax Medical, a company that sold medicines produced by India’s Marion Biotech in Uzbekistan.
According to state prosecutor Saidkarim Akilov, Quramax CEO Raghvendra Pratar Singh, allegedly paid officials at the state centre for expertise and standardisation of medicinal products US$33,000 to skip a mandatory inspection of its products.
It was unclear from the prosecutor’s statement whether the inspection was supposed to involve tests in Uzbekistan or a request for tests to be carried out by the producer in India.
Mr Singh denied the charges but admitted to handing over the sum to officials through an intermediary as a “token of appreciation”. He said he had no idea how and by whom that money was used later.
Seven of the 21 defendants pleaded guilty to at least some of the charges against them, which included tax evasion, sale of substandard or counterfeit medicines, abuse of office, negligence, forgery and bribery.
Officials have not said why 45 of the deaths had remained unreported since last year.
State prosecutors also said on Wednesday that Quramax had imported Marion Biotech medicines at an inflated price via two Singapore-based intermediary companies, which prompted tax evasion charges.
Reuters
