Swiss pharmaceutical drug maker Novartis announced it will pay $678 million to end a long-running civil lawsuit regarding allegations of hundreds of millions of dollars paid in kickbacks to doctors to induce them into prescribing drugs to patients to boost Novartis sales.
In July 2019, the Department of Justice filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York following a lawsuit originally filed under the whistleblower provisions of the False Claims Act. The case was brought by a former Novartis sales representative, Oswald Bilotta.
