Swiss pharmaceutical drug maker Novartis announced it has set aside $700 million for a potential settlement in a long-running lawsuit over allegations that the company paid hundreds of millions of dollars in kickbacks to doctors to induce them into prescribing drugs to patients to boost their sales.
The Department of Justice has 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.
