The courts recognized on appeal the civil liability of Laboratoires Servier in the Mediator case. Victims will now be able to be compensated more quickly.
At the end of November 2015, the French justice recognized for the first time the civil liability of Laboratoires Servier in the Mediator case. And five months later, the promise to victims of faster compensation takes a little more shape. This Thursday, the Court of Appeal of Versailles (Yvelines) has indeed confirmed the judgment of first instance.
In its decision, the court follows the decision of the Tribunal de Grande Instance (TGI) of Nanterre: “the Mediator is a defective product”, which “does not offer the security that one can legitimately expect”, because “the risks associated with its use exceed its therapeutic value ”.
In addition, the judges underline that “these same risks were not brought to the knowledge of neither the doctors nor the patients”. They therefore conclude their verdict by condemning Servier to compensate a woman up to 7,650 euros, while she was asking for more than 40,000.
A cassation appeal under consideration
In comments reported by Agence France Presse (AFP), the patient’s lawyer, Me Martine Verdier, hailed “a great victory”, stressing in particular that the court considers “that it is therefore established that at the latest in 1997 there were corroborating scientific data on the harmful effects of Mediator ”. However, she adds that the sums allocated to her client are, on the other hand, “notoriously insufficient”.
For her part, the lawyer for Laboratoires Servier, Me Nathalie Carrère, maintained with AFP that there was no “warning signal or real risk demonstrated and proven before 2009”. “The laboratories are considering the advisability of making an appeal in cassation”, she added.
Withdrawn from the market in 2009, the drug Mediator (benfluorex) was prescribed for thirty years as an appetite suppressant. It is believed to have caused significant damage to the heart valves in patients. The second chamber of the TGI de Nanterre had been examining since September the compensation claims of two victims with valve disease.
Criminal proceedings are stalling
Regarding the victims, the industrialist announced last September that he had already paid nearly 12 million euros, as part of out-of-court proceedings of the” National Office for Compensation for Medical Accidents (ONIAM).
At present, more than 9,000 victims have chosen this option, which has the advantage of offering patients a faster procedure to obtain compensation, while civil proceedings have stagnated until now. Faced with ONIAM, 1,282 offers of compensation were reportedly made by Servier. Of these, 748 have already been paid, 485 are awaiting a response, and only 3% have been refused.
Finally, it should be noted that on the penal level things are progressing slowly. And the victims will still have to wait for the criminal proceedings initiated in this case to finally be brought to justice. For the moment, the date of the great criminal trial of the Mediator, with the judicial investigation opened in Paris, has still not been fixed.
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