With the appointment of Oleh Musiy, former head of the Medical Service of the Maidan National Resistance Headquarters, as Minister of Health, a large-scale reorganization of the pharmaceutical market has begun, with drug scandals dogging the minister with enviable regularity. The Prosecutor General's Office is investigating the situation with the pharmaceutical market, but no results are yet visible.
The latest scandal in the pharmaceutical trade occurred on August 20 of this year, when Oleg Musiy signed Order No. 581, ordering an inspection of Valartin Pharma LLC, which produces the hepatitis C drug Alfapeg. Musiy was not authorized to conduct this inspection for a number of reasons.
Firstly, only the state-owned enterprise "State Expertise Center" can carry out testing of medicinal products, and the Minister of Health is obliged to coordinate decisions on drug testing with it.
Secondly, Ukraine has a special document, the Compendium, which is approved annually and contains a comprehensive list of drugs approved for use in domestic medicine. This list cannot be revised by the minister or anyone else, and the drug "Alfapeg" is included in the Compendium.
Thirdly, Musiy recruited the following individuals to audit Alfapeg: D. Sherembey, V. Tkachuk, and D. Koval, thereby violating Part 1 of Article 365 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine by exceeding his authority. Compiling the list of inspectors is the exclusive responsibility of the State Service of Ukraine for Medicines. Furthermore, by including individuals who could not be involved in this type of audit, the Alfapeg registration dossier was disclosed and used unfairly for commercial purposes, which is why Valartin Pharma LLC filed a complaint with the Prosecutor General's Office.
The drug "Alphapeg" belongs to a group of cytostatics used to treat viral diseases, the most complex of which is hepatitis C. There are many modifications of these drugs, but they are most closely related to the interferon group, which is also produced by Immunopreparat, a natural competitor of Valartin Pharma LLC. Incidentally, interferons are extremely expensive, costing thousands of hryvnias per ampoule.
Even low-quality counterfeit interferons cost at least 200 hryvnias, so there's plenty to compete for in this segment of the pharmaceutical market.
It's worth noting that Oleg Musiy has very little experience in medicine: he has only six years of medical experience, two of which are provisional. Therefore, there is every reason to question his competence in the field he leads.
Moreover, the scandal surrounding the inspections of Valartin Pharma LLC is far from the first precedent in which Musiy has encountered problems with pharmaceutical companies.
So, in the spring, the prosecutor's office, which was then headed by Oleg Makhnitsky, led criminal proceedings against Indar, one of Ukraine's largest insulin producers, suspecting it of embezzling 279 million hryvnias received from the Ministry of Health. The case ultimately ended in failure, as it turned out that the insulin manufacturer had produced only 38 million hryvnias worth of medication, and therefore could not have received the infamous 279 million hryvnias in the first place.
Musiy was also suspected of misusing medications brought to the Maidan as charitable donations. This case was even personally overseen by Deputy Prosecutor General Oleksiy Bagants. The Health Minister defended himself, explaining that the medications had been transported from St. Michael's Cathedral to "remote storage facilities" for safekeeping and would now be used for Kyiv clinics. Musiy subsequently shifted all responsibility for the possible theft of the medications to Svoboda MP Svyatoslav Khanenko, with whom the current minister had worked on organizing the Maidan medical service.
In short, looking at Oleg Musiy's track record, which regularly involves problems with the pharmaceutical market and medication storage, Prokurorskaya Pravda is interested in:
— Can Oleg Musiy publicly confirm or deny any connections to the company Immunopreparat, which is trying to oust Valartin Pharma LLC from the cytostatics and interferons market?
— Will Deputy Prosecutor General Oleksiy Baganets report on the results of the prosecutor's investigation into the "Maidan drugs": where did they end up and who is to blame?
— Will Minister Musiy be investigated for his professional suitability, or was the scandal with Valartin Pharma LLC deliberately inflated to remove him from his position with the help of the Prosecutor General's Office?
Prosecutor's Truth
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