Parent drug companies cannot avoid sins of subsidiaries, says European Court of Justice
Consumers suing pharmaceutical companies can change the formal identity of a defendant in court proceedings after a standard 10-year limit for making such claims, if their old target is a wholly owned subsidiary of the new one, says the European Court of Justice (ECJ).
Consumers suing pharmaceutical companies can change the formal identity of a defendant in court proceedings after a standard 10-year limit for making such claims, if their old target is a wholly owned subsidiary of the new one, says the European Court of Justice (ECJ).
The ECJ has come to this conclusion following a case involving France's Aventis Pasteur, which was sued by a British patient over alleged brain damage from a vaccine. The patient initially sought damages against UK subsidiary Merieux UK (now Aventis Pasteur), but later he asked this company to be substituted in proceedings for the parent company Aventis Pasteur.
The problem was that this claim was made more than 10 years after the patient had allegedly suffered brain damage from the vaccine, and the House of Lords asked the ECJ whether this followed the European Union's (EU) defective products directive (85/374/EEC), which usually mandates that cases are launched within 10 years of a claimed injury.
The court ruled that generally no action can be "brought against the producer, after the expiry of the 10-year period". However, the claimant can change the target of actions from a subsidiary to its owner after that deadline if the parent was responsible for selling the allegedly defective medicine, and did not inform the injured person of this relevant ownership chain.