Sold in Britain, the HIV drugs for Africa

THEY wriggled and squirmed, made excuses and risked the wrath of their largest investors. But eventually, shamed by U2 rock star Bono, who banged the Oval Office desk while winning support from President George Bush, global pharmaceutical giants began supplying some of the world's poorest countries with cut-price treatments for HIV patients.

However, companies such as GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer have discovered that huge quantities of the treatments sent to Africa are part of a highly lucrative illegal trade, with many returning to Britain to be sold for a huge profit.

Graham Satchwell, a former senior detective with British Transport Police and now an expert in pharmaceutical fraud, is trying to catch the criminal gangs behind the trade.

It was on a recent visit to Dakar, capital of Senegal in West Africa, that Satchwell, pursuing a tip from UK Customs, realised the scale of the problem the drugs companies were up against.

A dusty drive through shanty towns led to an open barn in a run-down industrial sector close to the airport. Piled high were boxes of expensive HIV drugs made by GlaxoSmithKline. The label identifying them as charitable products had been removed.

With the connivance of senior officials, the drugs were going straight back to Europe, he says.

Eventually, according to Satchwell, the drugs ended up with Dowelhurst Ltd, a reputable firm based in Warwick, which sold them on in the UK.

Dowelhurst has long been in the sights of GSK. With a turnover of about £170 million, it is a major player in the import of pharmaceutical products from Europe, a process known as parallel importing.

These are legitimate drugs made by GSK and other big firms, but they are sold more cheaply to health services in other parts of Europe - particularly Greece and Spain - than in the UK.

Dowelhurst boss Richard Taylor buys drugs abroad, ships them into Britain and resells them to the NHS. This is all perfectly legal and it is reckoned that the health service buys more than a quarter of its drugs - 120m products - this way, saving millions.

But GSK claims that the practice is also a route for counterfeit or out-of-date medicines - and smuggled goods such as the Aids drugs Satchwell tracked - to reach patients.

'Some 10,000 people die each year in UK hospitals from adverse drug reaction,' says Satchwell. 'How much of that is because of counterfeit or damaged drugs no one knows.'

There is no suggestion that Dowelhurst has supplied counterfeit or outofdate drugs.

The trade costs the pharmaceutical giants £1bn a year in the UK alone. But recent price cuts agreed by the companies with the NHS and the fact that many major drugs are no longer protected by patent and are therefore produced by scores of firms, have hit the business.

Gary Lewis, chairman of parallel importer A1 Pharmaceuticals, based in Dulwich, south London, said: 'The Government demanded that big pharmaceutical companies slash the NHS drugs bill by 7%. Rather than drop prices across the board, the companies saw an opportunity to knock out parallel traders by slashing the cost of the most commonly imported drugs.'

GSK has thrown all kinds of legal obstacles at Taylor, a director of 52 companies, but has failed to stop him. Last year, it sought a court injunction to ban him from importing HIV drugs. Taylor says this was going too far: 'The judge refused the injunction. I bought the drugs in Europe and they were European labelled. In one case I had doubts about where the product came from and sent it myself to GSK.'

Taylor thinks publicity sought by GSK for the battle over Aids drugs is a smear. 'I predict we will soon see a settlement in this case,' he says. 'The real story is the peculiar route GSK took to supply these drugs. They gave them to a bunch of French companies, including one called Karim, which was not even a pharmaceutical firm but a leather merchant.' GSK denies this.

Satchwell says the French companies were not the buyers of the drugs from GSK, but had bought them after they were reimported to Europe.

Dowelhurst may be an innocent victim of European criminals, but Satchwell says the trade in charitable drugs is an international scandal.

Aids, malaria and TB are the three big killers - and treatments are being diverted from the intended recipients all over the world, he says. 'This is a trade worth hundreds of millions of dollars and it kills people,' he says, 'It is happening in Africa and I believe it is also happening with aid for tsunami victims. Global action is needed to stop it.'

British judges rejected suggestions that Dowelhurst was involved knowingly in importing charity drugs, but the company has agreed to pay money to Aids charities.

In an attempt to avoid HIV treatments being diverted, GSK introduced special, trilingual packaging, with embossed tablets and new batch numbers. It has also changed the colour of the coating on tablets from white to red.

But so long as corrupt officials are prepared to cheat the world's weakest, and unscrupulous middlemen are prepared to take the drugs and disguise their origin, the trade will continue and not even Bono will be able to stop it.