Chennai: An Indian drug shipment bound for Venezuela makes a pit stop at a Dutch port. Local customs sieze the consignment on charges of counterfeiting and patents infringement.
A trade promotion agency in India cries foul, saying the drugs are perfectly legal in the market they were meant for—Latin America in this case.
The European Commission is non-committal, citing ongoing litigation in national courts.
A patents lawyer points to problematic definitions of counterfeit drugs that could lead to misinterpretation of intellectual property rights violations.
Infringement? Workers at Dr Reddy’s manufacturing plant in Andhra Pradesh. In a bid to avoid shipments being seized, drug makers are looking at alternatives such as storage facilities in non-European countries. Amit Bhargava / Bloomberg
Such instances are on the rise as countries and businesses start fighting turf wars over intellectual property rights and use local laws and international guidelines to their advantage.
A new battleground seems to have opened up over shipments of India’s drug exporters meant for Latin America that are being seized in transit by European Union (EU) countries.
In the last one month alone, Chandigarh-based Ind-Swift Laboratories Ltd and several other Mumbai-based bulk drug makers—all of them small- and medium-sized firms—have had their shipments seized at EU ports, according to the Pharmaceuticals Export Promotion Council (Pharmexcil), an agency set up by India’s commerce ministry.
“In the last couple of months, we have been receiving an increasing number of reports from pharma exporters about their consignments being seized in European Union countries including Germany, France, the UK and the Netherlands,” said Pharmexcil executive director P.V. Appaji.
Cost implications
This would force exporters to look at alternative routes to send the medicines, which is likely to impact the cost competitiveness of Indian generic drugs, said Ind-Swift vice-chairman N.R. Munjal.
Munjal and Pharmexcil said the reason EU authorities have given for the seizures was that these drug consignments violated intellectual property rights and were, therefore, counterfeit. Pharmexcil, on its part, says the seized products—meant for largely unregulated Latin American markets—are genuine and legal.
“These are not substandard or in anyway of compromised quality. Besides, they are not meant for the European market but are just using EU ports while in transit to markets in Latin America, where they do not violate any laws,” Appaji claimed.
According to Pharmexcil, companies whose consignments ran into similar trouble include JB Chemicals and Pharmaceuticals Ltd, Medico Remedies Pvt. Ltd, Titan Pharma India Pvt. Ltd, and Mission Pharmaceuticals Ltd, all based in Mumbai, and Hyderabad-based Sainor Pharma Pvt. Ltd.