In this essay I am going to look at AstraZeneca PLC one of the world’s top pharmaceutical companies. By describing several relevant cases and commenting on them I will try to evaluate the extent to which the Company acts under the principles framing its corporate governance and corporate social responsibility policies.
To give brief overview, AstraZeneca PLC, formed on April 6, 1999, by the merger of British Zeneca Group PLC and Swedish Astra AB, is one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world. It is well illustrated by some key facts listed on the Company’s website:
“Our products are available in over 100 countries; sales in 2005 totalled $24 billion, with an operating profit of $6.5 billion; we spend over $14 million…show more content… (Kelton, 2004). In their first law offence, AstraZeneca distributed thousands of free prescription pharmaceutical Zoladex (goserelin acetate), which is used for prostate cancer treatment, samples to doctors, knowing that they would later charge their patients and insurance programmes for them. During the second offence, the Company inflated the drug’s price reported to Medicare as the basis for reimbursement at meantime giving huge discounts to medics. What’s more, the Company misreported and underpaid the Medicaid rebates that it owed to the states for the use of Zoladex. These law offences resulted in multimillion-dollar losses for federally and state-funded insurance programs and patients. (U. S. Government Printing Office, 2003).
Although there is no law offence involved in the second case, it is still no less alarming. The AstraZeneca’s cholesterol-lowering drug Crestor released in August, 2004, received a serious credibility blow, after it had been linked to the death from rhabdomyolysis (i.e. potentially fatal muscle disease, which threatens to everyone using daily statin doses of 80mg) of a 39-year-old women. In addition to that, statin had been linked to other 15 adverse events. David Brennan, AstraZeneca’s president and chief executive officer called did
