New York AG uncovers money in Purdue opioid litigation

The New York state attorney general’s office said Friday that it had tracked about $1 billion in wire transfers by the Sackler family, including through Swiss bank accounts, suggesting that the family tried to shield wealth as it faced a raft of litigation over its role in the opioid crisis.

Earlier this week, thousands of municipal governments and nearly two dozen states tentatively reached a settlement with the Sackler family and the company it owns, Purdue Pharma, maker of OxyContin.

But the attorneys general of a majority of states, including New York and Massachusetts, are balking at the proposed deal, contending that the Sackler family has siphoned off company profits that should be used to pay for the billions of dollars in damage caused by opioids.

The wire transfers are part of a lawsuit against Purdue and individual Sacklers in New York. Letitia James, the state’s attorney general, had issued subpoenas last month to 33 financial institutions and investment advisers with ties to the Sacklers in an effort to trace the full measure of the family’s wealth.

“While the Sacklers continue to lowball victims and skirt a responsible settlement, we refuse to allow the family to misuse the courts in an effort to shield their financial misconduct,” James said in a statement. “Records from one financial institution alone have shown approximately $1 billion in wire transfers between the Sacklers, entities they control and different financial institutions, including those that have funneled funds into Swiss bank accounts,” she added.

Forbes has estimated that the family fortune is worth $13 billion, a figure the family has not disputed — but many state attorneys general believe that the family has far more hidden away, as a safeguard against the cascade of litigation.

In addition to the thousands of lawsuits in state and federal court aimed at Purdue, some 26 states have named the Sacklers individually, with others — most recently North Carolina — having announced they intend to pursue family members as well.

The Sacklers and Purdue have contested the legal actions.

“Purdue has already produced more than 51 million pages of documents to the state, including voluminous financial and business information,” a lawyer representing Purdue said in a filing in the New York case earlier this month. The company is seeking to quash subpoenas, calling them “premature, facially defective, overbroad” as well as “harassing, and an improper attempt to avoid the rules and procedures governing party discovery.”

New court documents filed by James’ office Friday afternoon presented only initial findings from a single unnamed financial institution that has thus far responded to the subpoenas issued by her office.

A series of transfers involving Mortimer D.A. Sackler, a former Purdue board member, were highlighted in the filings. In one case, $64 million was transferred in 2009 from a previously unknown trust called Purdue Pharma Trust MDAS, through a Swiss bank account, and then to Mortimer Sackler, the filing said.