CVS's Omnicare to pay $23 million to resolve U.S. kickback case

CVS Health Corp's Omnicare unit has agreed to pay $23 million to resolve a whistleblower lawsuit alleging that it took kickbacks from a drugmaker to promote two antidepressants, according to settlement papers released on Friday.

The accord, confirmed by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Boston, will resolve a lawsuit against the pharmacy operator filed in 2007 by two former employees of drugmaker Organon USA Inc on behalf of the federal government and various states.

CVS in a statement said the alleged conduct at issue took place before it acquired Omnicare in 2015. Omnicare neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing as part of the settlement.

The lawsuit claimed that from 1999 to 2005, Omnicare and certain pharmacies it acquired sought and received kickbacks from Organon in the form of discounts in exchange for promoting the antidepressants Remeron and Remeron SolTabs.

The lawsuit said that as a result, Omnicare violated the False Claims Act by submitting kickback-tainted claims to Medicaid, the government health insurance program for the poor and disabled, for reimbursement. read more »

A secret behind Theranos's downfall is revealed

Unsealed documents cast new light on the oversight failure at the heart of the Theranos saga.

highly decorated board of directors may have been helpful to wunderkind Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes when she was first trying to legitimize her blood-testing company and raise new funding. Respected names like former U.S. secretaries of state George Shultz and Henry Kissinger lent credibility to the start-up, helping bring in new investors, even if they had no scientific background themselves. But a lack of medical knowledge, it seems, also left some members of the board unequipped, or perhaps merely incurious, as allegations piled up that the company had been misleading the public and investors about its technology. In 2015, The Wall Street Journal began publishing a series of investigative reports that suggested Theranos was not actually using its own proprietary blood-testing device, as investors believed, but rather standard industry equipment to analyze samples. But Shultz and former U.S. Navy admiral Gary Roughead, who were board members at the time, say they never questioned Holmes about the reports. read more »

Tilton Rejected by U.S. Supreme Court on SEC Fraud Complaint

The U.S. Supreme Court rejected an appeal by Lynn Tilton, the Patriarch Partners founder once known as the “Diva of Distressed," refusing to intervene in a Securities and Exchange Commission case that could bar her from the securities industry.

Tilton is fighting an SEC administrative complaint that accuses her of misleading investors about the value of risky pools of corporate loans. A ruling from a judge at the SEC could come any day.

Tilton argued in her appeal that the SEC’s use of in-house judges is unconstitutional and gives the agency an unfair advantage. She will have another chance to make that argument -- and perhaps seek Supreme Court review -- should the SEC judge rule against her. read more »

Goldman Sachs Accused of Financing Venezuela’s ‘Dictatorial Regime’

The president of Venezuela's opposition-run Congress on Monday accused Wall Street investment bank Goldman Sachs of "aiding and abetting the country's dictatorial regime" following a report that it had bought $2.8 billion in bonds from the cash-strapped country.

The Wall Street Journal on Sunday said Goldman paid 31 cents on the dollar for bonds issued by state oil company PDVSA that mature in 2022, or around $865 million, citing five people familiar with the transaction.

That comes as two months of opposition protests against President Nicolas Maduro have killed almost 60 people and the collapse of the country's socialist economy has left millions of people struggling to eat. read more »