Recently there was information that the head of the Pharmasyntez Group of Companies and a pharmaceutical plant in St. Petersburg, an Indian entrepreneur Vikram Punia, received a preferential billion-dollar loan for the construction of a new plant. This news caused a wave of emotions in industry circles – from outrage to irony, given the businessman’s controversial reputation and his resemblance to Ostap Bender.
The only plant in European Russia
Company Pharmasyntez founded by a native of India, now a citizen of the Russian Federation Vikram Punia in 1997, he is its permanent CEO and co-owner. The company is focused on the development and production of drugs for the treatment of socially significant diseases such as oncology, covid, tuberculosis, hepatitis, HIV and others. The volume of production is about 70 million packages per year for 250 types of drugs.
In 2020, Pharmasyntez took 5th place in the Forbes ranking of the 20 Best Pharmaceutical Companies in Russia.
At the moment, the group of companies in Russia has five factories – in Irkutsk, Ussuriysk, Bratsk, Tyumen, and the company in St. Petersburg is called JSC Pharmasyntez-Nord, it went live in 2017. As you can see, this is the only GC plant located in the European part of Russia. Nord operates in the Novoorlovskaya special economic zone between St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region, and specializes in the production of cancer drugs. The volume of investments in the first site amounted to 2.5 billion rubles. Even then, at its opening six years ago, Vikram Punia noted that within the framework of this project, it is planned to build four enterprises in St. Petersburg, that is, four production sites.
Use someone else’s designs
Vikram Singh Punia, together with his wife Irina, the founder of 11 companies in Russia, has an ambiguous reputation in the core market.
Not to say scandalous. Some media explicitly indicate that his business take-off in Russian pharmaceuticals may be related to Tatyana Golikova, who was the Minister of Health and Social Development of the Russian Federation from 2007 to 2012, and later began to oversee social issues already as the first deputy chairman of the Russian government. However, there are no facts about this, only rumors and assumptions.
But experts express doubts about the quality of individual drugs from Pharmasyntez. So, some phthisiatricians criticize the drug for tuberculosis “Perkhlozon” for the high cost and side effects. By the way, on the packaging of “Perchlozone” there is a postscript in small letters: “The mechanism of action of the drug is not fully understood.“. Doesn’t sound too optimistic for a patient, does it? Such doubts with specific facts of their uselessness or “side effects” apply to many drugs. Yes, most of the drugs from Pharmasyntez are generics, that is, analogues of well-known patented drugs. In general, the company is constantly suing someone about licenses and patents. So, at one time, Pharmsintez registered an analogue of an anti-HIV drug – rilpivirine, the patent for which belongs to Janssen, which caused a loud scandal on the market. After all, you can use the drug only after the expiration of the patent, and it expires only in 2027.
There were also proceedings with similar introductory conflicts with companies from different countries – Gilead Sciences, Tuteur SACIFIA MSD.
To put it simply, Vikram Singh Puria and his specialists, apparently, use other people’s developments, without spending money on expensive drug trials, buy generics in India, where they are inexpensive, and sell them at a premium in Russia, where for some reason For some reason, they turn a blind eye to the licensing of these drugs and, in general, to the scandalous reputation of a businessman. Although in 2018 the investigative department of the Investigative Committee for the Irkutsk region opened a criminal case on tax evasion in the amount of 190 million rubles against Vikram Punia. According to Journalist Control, the investigation suspected that “representatives of Pharmasyntez entered into contracts for the purchase of raw materials from foreign suppliers through offshore intermediary firms.