VIAGRA: Pfizer saca "sus fuerzas" y contrataca...

By Simeon Bennett July 8 (Bloomberg) --
With the millions he made peddling fake Viagra, Martin Hickman bought a beachside villa on Spain’s Costa del Sol, a diamond-studded Rolex and a flat in London. Pfizer Inc. aims to make sure he never gets to enjoy them.

The spoils of Hickman’s crimes helped settle a trademark infringement lawsuit brought by the world’s largest drugmaker three years ago. It’s the biggest example of a new approach Pfizer is taking to fight counterfeiting of prescription drugs, an industry that’s almost doubled to $75 billion over five years, according to the New York-based Center for Medicine in the Public Interest.

Pfizer, whose erectile dysfunction pill Viagra is one of the most copied medicines, once relied on local authorities and criminal courts to hunt down offenders. Now it’s taken matters into its own hands, hiring former U.S. customs officials, FBI agents, Turkish narcotics experts and Hong Kong police to hunt counterfeiters. In China, they’re tracking fakes to the source, raiding derelict warehouses for evidence of illegal drug-making. In the U.K., they’re using civil courts to hit fake pill peddlers where it hurts most.

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Hickman was one of the first test cases of Pfizer’s tougher stance. Between 2003 and 2007 he sold more than 6 million pounds ($8.9 million) of bogus Viagra and another impotence drug on about 150 websites, according to Britain’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, or MHRA.
Hickman used the money to buy a four-bedroom farmhouse near Manchester, a 2.5 million-pound flat in Chelsea, a villa near Marbella, Spain, a Bentley Arnage and two Range Rovers. He also had an insurance valuation for jewelry totaling 267,000 pounds, including a diamond-studded gold Rolex watch and a Piaget watch worth about 100,000 pounds each, and a Louis Vuitton bracelet valued at 25,000 pounds, according to Pfizer.

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