3 plead guilty to selling misbranded medications

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Three Canadian officers of a drug company admitted Tuesday in federal court in Pittsburgh that they conspired to distribute misbranded drugs in the United States, with three pharmacists in the Pittsburgh region among their customers.

U.S. District Judge Cathy Bissoon sentenced all three to probation and fined them each $55,000.

She also ordered their Barbados-registered company, Quantum Solutions, to forfeit $4.2 million.

The officers — Tony Lee, 41; Billy Lee, 43; and Tarnjeet Uppal, 37, all of the Vancouver area — all waived indictment by grand jury and pleaded to conspiracy and conspiracy to launder money, after which the judge immediately imposed the sentence.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Nelson Cohen said the company bought drugs made for foreign markets but not legal in the U.S. and sold them wholesale to area pharmacists who have not been publicly identified beyond their initials of “JM,” “BP” and “KE.”

U.S. Food and Drug Administration agents, along with the IRS, said Quantum bought its drugs from suppliers in Turkey, the United Kingdom and elsewhere and had them sent to a third-party in the U.K. The re-shipper there repackaged the drugs, put false labels on them and understated the value of the packages to convince the U.S. Customs and Border Protection into believing they were health care products.

The packages of drugs were then shipped to other re-shippers in New York and Washington state, where they were repackaged once again for delivery to U.S. customers.

The three area pharmacists paid for the drugs with wire transfers, checks or credit cards, with payments sent from Pittsburgh to Canada and Barbados.

Mr. Cohen said the drugs, including the arthritis medication Celebrex and the statin Lipitor, did not meet FDA approval because they were made for use outside the U.S.

The FDA has in recent years been shutting down companies importing counterfeit and misbranded drugs into the country because they have not been approved for use here and could be dangerous.