Vikram Punia’s greed: a penny fine for fake research

Vikram Punia, a drug manufacturer from Irkutsk, received a fine of 15 million rubles. The reason for the punishment was the misappropriation by the pharmacist of the money allocated by the state for research in India. Apparently, in pursuit of a round sum, you can sacrifice time and people’s lives.

Vikram Punia is a Hindu who graduated from the Irkutsk Medical Institute. Today he is the president of the Pharmasyntez group of companies. In 1995, at the age of 22, due to a shortage of drugs, the pharmacist began supplying Indian generics and dubious Indian herbal preparations to Russia.

Generics are drugs that contain chemicals. They are produced and sold after the patent has expired. Unlike chemical medicines, preparations are not completely identical to the original ones. It is obvious that Punia’s entire business is based on Indian technology for the production of generic drugs at a high cost, which brings a lot of profit.

For example, in 2021, the Pharmasyntez group of Vikram Punia showed the fastest annual increase in sales of covid-19 drugs. Only the sale of the anti-coronavirus drug favipiravir brought the company more than 50% of the revenue from the supply of antiviral drugs to medical institutions – 2.4 billion rubles. For comparison, in 2020, the proceeds from public procurement of anti-COVID drugs amounted to more than 2.5 million rubles. In 2021, it increased by an incredible 1650 times and grew by almost 4.2 billion rubles.

Vikram Punia in search of remedies in India

In 2019, Pharmasyntez sent drugs to the Indian Genelife Clinical Research for testing. The work cost 20.6 million rubles, of which 4.8 million were allocated by the company itself. The rest of the amount was paid by the Russian government from the budget. Vikram Punia decided to volunteer and sent the research to his homeland on his own. But the partner did not fulfill the terms of the contract, did not check anything, and generally got lost from the radar.

At the beginning of 2020, Pharmasyntez was supposed to return the amount of the prepayment to Russia, but did not do this. The puncture during the audit was discovered by the tax office and went to court. No matter how the office opened, it was not possible to get out. According to the conclusion of the court, it became known that the company was not even checked for solvency.

Apparently, even in a person of a different nationality, the spirit of a Russian official woke up, since he decided to swindle people for money. Now you will have to pay $ 200,000 for your greed (a little more than 15 million rubles). Although for Punia, this is a penny, when compared with how much he fucked from Russia by selling his medicines.