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Prescription drug wholesaler pleads guilty to smuggling counterfeit cancer drugs
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The FDA recently reported that the owner of a Turkish drug wholesaler has pleaded guilty to charges of smuggling misbranded and adulterated cancer treatment drugs into the United States.
Sabahaddin Akman, owner of the Turkish firm Ozay Pharmaceuticals, pleaded guilty in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, to smuggling counterfeit cancer drugs including multiple shipments of Altuzan, the Turkish version of bevacizumab (Avastin, Genentech).
The drugs did not meet FDA standards and had not been approved for distribution in the United States.
The FDA’s Office of Criminal Investigations organized an international investigation that led to Akman’s arrest in Puerto Rico in January 2014. The investigation identified Akman and his company as a source of Altuzan.
“These criminals exploited our most vulnerable patients when they arranged for their illicit drugs to be brought into the United States and used to treat cancer patients. We will continue to investigate and bring to justice those who prey on our ill, susceptible patients,” Philip J. Walsky, acting director of the FDA’s Office of Criminal Investigations, said in a press release. “We commend our colleagues – international, national, state, and local – whose contributions helped bring this case to a successful conclusion.”
Akman, along with his employee, Ozkan Semizoglu, obtained the illicit drugs and then used shipping labels to conceal the illegal nature of the shipments, including customs declarations falsely describing the contents as “gifts,” “documents,” or “product samples” with no or low-declared monetary values, according to the FDA.
They also broke large drug shipments into several smaller packages to reduce the probability of seizures by US Customs and Border Protection officials, authorities said.