NEW YORK, Dec. 13 (Xinhua) -- U.S. multinational strategy and management consulting firm McKinsey & Company has agreed to pay 650 million U.S. dollars to settle a federal investigation into its work for opioids manufacturer Purdue Pharma, according to court papers filed in Virginia on Friday.
As part of the deal with the U.S. Justice Department, McKinsey will avoid prosecution on criminal charges if it pays the sum and follows certain conditions for five years, including ceasing any work on the sale, marketing or promoting of controlled substances, according to the court papers.
A former McKinsey senior partner has also agreed to plead guilty to obstruction of justice for deleting documents from his laptop after he became aware of investigations into Purdue Pharma, The Associated Press cited the filings in its report about the case. Court filings say Purdue paid McKinsey more than 93 million dollars over 15 years for a number of products, including how to improve revenue from OxyContin.
One of the jobs, the papers said, was to identify which prescribers would generate the most additional prescriptions if Purdue salespeople focused on that. That resulted in prescriptions that "were not for a medically accepted indication, were unsafe, ineffective, and medically unnecessary, and that were often diverted for uses that lacked a legitimate medical purpose," the filing said. ■
