Posts Tagged ‘United Kingdom’

When London police raided an apartment in west London last month, they were looking for visa cheats. What they found instead was over $750,000 worth of counterfeit medications stored in deplorable conditions.

A raid by Home Office Immigration Enforcement officers in West London that was aimed at catching people who had overstayed their visas instead found a vast quantity of unlicensed prescription medications, reports the MHRA. Investigators from the MHRA believe the drugs, which were mostly ED, weight loss, and hair loss treatments, were manufactured in India. Anabolic steroids were also found in the raid.

4 Wales residents were sentenced in a counterfeit drugs case spanning Europe. The four accepted delivery of counterfeit & illicit drugs from Pakistan, which they then repackaged and shipped to online customers in the European Union.

On March 27, 2013, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) in the United Kingdom announced the sentences of 4 defendants in a counterfeit drug operation spanning from Wales to Pakistan.

Kevin Xu a citizen of the Peoples Republic of China was sentenced to seventy-eight months imprisonment for distributing counterfeit and misbranded drugs in the United States, on January 1th, 2009.

Xu was sentenced after being found guilty in a jury trial that took place in August 2008. Xu was indicted in 2007, as the result of an undercover investigation conducted by the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the US Food and Drug Administration Office of Criminal Investigation (FDA).

Xu described to undercover agents his ability to manufacture all manner of brand name prescription drugs, and included a list of 25 different prescription drugs he could produce, including Plavix (used for treating blood clots), Casodex (for the treatment of prostate cancer), and Tamiflu (used for the treatment of influenza) along with several other life-saving drugs.

Xu had been conducting his business throughout Europe, but the investigation that resulted in his arrest only began once he attempted to break into the United States pharmaceuticals market. The US investigation into Xu’s activities uncovered the startling volume of business that he was conducting in the United Kingdom. As a result of this discovery, massive drug recalls were declared by the UK’s Medicines and Health Regulatory Agency (MHRA), and a counterfeit drug distribution ring based in the United Kingdom was apprehended.

MHRA Director of Inspection, Enforcement and Standards, Gerald Heddell, as well as FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg, and OCI Director John Roth are all speaking at the 2012 Interchange on September 28, 2012.  

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The United Kingdom’s Medicine & Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) confiscated £14.4 million in assets from a convicted counterfeit medicine dealer. Simon Martin Hickman, 52, from Manchester, was sentenced to two years imprisonment in June 2009 following a conviction of selling and supplying fake and unlicensed medicines, as well as money laundering £1.4 million, announced…