Grubstakers - (Patreon Unlocked) Episode 189: Malvinder Mohan Singh & Shivinder Mohan Singh (Ranbaxy Laboratories)

Episode Date: July 21, 2021

This week we are taking a look at the Singh brothers. Malvinder Mohan Singh and Shivinder Mohan Singh the heirs to a generic pharmaceutical company that would be responsible for providing Africans with AIDS, junk drugs. A major source for this episode was A Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom by Katherine Eban. Sean is slowly being radicalized by RFK so a significant portion is spent on new theories as to why the world sucks. All that and more right here on Grubstakers. Check out Grubstakers.net for a full list of our resources on this and every other episode. Enjoy!

We find people that basically can't make enough to eat before they go into the fields. I don't believe that. I think that you're looking at other places that are not Central Romana. People actually who focus on and who like getting an orgasm never get one. Pull up your socks and figure out what you're going to do. Any chance we'll ever get to be a complete red state? Oh yeah. For the future is always uncertain. But more uncertain now.

And listen, Blue Ivy is six years old. Beyonce's days, she tried to outbid me on a painting. Everybody in Atlanta right now at the Louis Vuitton store, if you black, don't go to Louis Vuitton today. That's why you need to take a meeting with Kanye West. Bernard Arnault. the Louis Vuitton store if you black don't go to Louis Vuitton today that's why you need to take a meeting with Kanye West but now I know hello and welcome to grub stakers the podcast on billionaires my name is yogi paywall and I'm joined by my wonderful co-hosts Sean P McCarthy Steve Jeffers and today we

are covering Malvinder Mohan Singh and his brother Shivinder Mohan Singh, the grandchildren to the patriarch of generic medicine in India by Mohan Singh. We will cover how their family got into the business, how they were able to dupe the FDA into allowing them to make junk medicine for Africans with AIDS, and how the scandal led the Singh brothers ending up in jail. For this episode, my main source was a book titled A Bottle of Lies, the Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom by Catherine Ebon. I was able to read most of this book for the episode. It details the scandal at Ranbaxy and how the FDA deals with generic pharmaceutical companies and the entire scandal that went down between Daichi, Ranbaxy, and the FDA deals with generic pharmaceutical companies, and the entire scandal that went down between Daichi Ranbaxy and the FDA.

Before we begin and go into the buyer, I want to ask you guys, what do you two know about generic medications? You guys fuck with generic medications? I've fucked with them in the past. Certainly. What about you, Sean? Yeah, I was on generic paxil for a minute um you know it actually it's just as good as the um the on label brands at taking away your

ability to sustain an erection so there's not a quality issue yes they're like okay it doesn't cure the other stuff but you can never get hard again. Right, right. You know, I remember when I would go to India, my cousin once had a headache. They want you to be Volcel. The medication is part of the Volcel advocacy project in the United States. Right, of course. I remember once when I went to India, my cousin had had a headache and he was asking uh me he was asking my mom for like an advil and she like joking was like oh why don't you take you know

one of the ones that they make here and he's like it just doesn't work the same and i feel like with generic pharmaceuticals we all kind know that sometimes they're not as good as name brand but we don't really know why i certainly was not aware as to the level of forgery that occurs with generics, and it's certainly not the case with all of them. But the notion that generic pharmaceuticals are cheaper is not because the ingredients may be different, but the practices in producing them and getting them to our shelves is one that allows them to be more competitive in the american market i'm looking at some statistics from the site statista on brand and generic prescription medication revenue from 2006 to 2019 and every year it looks like generic medication revenue, revenue from producing generic medication, either branded or unbranded, went steadily increased from about 55 billion or so in 2006, all the way up to a little over 100 billion last year.

Oh, wow. In 2019. And likewise, branded medications also increased uh by a larger percentage but still of course so it's it's a really important segment of the market for the world well it is interesting because i believe this is only our second episode looking at the generic pharmaceuticals market um the first one we did was Barry and Honey Sherman, which if you remember, those were two generic pharmaceutical billionaires who were brutally murdered in their own homes. And then the subjects of this generic pharmaceutical billionaire episode are the

Singh brothers who are currently in prison. So it's just like, I don't know what it is about this industry, but it does seem like there is a very dark underbelly to the generic pharmaceutical industry. That's one of the, those are like some of the side effects they warn you about in the advertisement for being a CEO of a pharmaceutical company. Right. That includes sudden death, actually. Right. That includes sudden death, actually. Right, right. They get the very fast-talking announcer to be like, may cause you to be murder-suicided in your own home and have it faked as if it was a suicide.

Talk to your doctor if you see shadows stalking you on your way home or other hallucinations. May cause your surveillance camera system to be disabled and you are murdered by Agent 47. You know, we actually did get an informant on the Honey and Barry Sherman episode. And let me put it this way. I have listened to our informant's details on what happened to Honey and Barry Sherman.

And at the end of this episode, our informants details on what happened to honey and Barry Sherman. And, uh, at the, uh, end of this episode, I will, uh, do a little addendum explaining everything that occurred with them.

But basically the, what our informants says is his murder was not due to the pharmaceutical industry, but by something slightly more sinister, but I'll cover that at the end of this episode. From reading this book, what I've learned is that like you know the concept of medicine being snake oil is not that old of a concept like the fda in the united

states and other regulatory agencies around the world making sure medicine that you put in your body will work is a relatively new concept anytime i I've seen people be fucking pissed off about the mask regulations, and people are like, wear a mask? Everyone's a fucking sheep. And it's like, we weren't wearing shoes 400 years ago.

What are you talking about? It doesn't matter. Everyone's going to do things that make them feel safer. And in terms of medicine being something that will cure what you're dealing with instead of kill you or, you know, make you drunk or put you in jail. That's relatively new in terms of the grand scale of medicine. Well, I would like to update the listeners because, you know, they've heard me

start on this Epstein-Bender and then go completely down the JFK, RFK assassination rabbit hole. And I would like to update them on my progress towards total insanity and disconnection from mainstream society i've started listening to like these youtube videos with rfk jr is uh one of rfk's surviving sons um he comes off very smart but uh he's also like an anti-vaxxer or like a safe vaccine guy sure uh and then he's also an anti-water fluoridation guy. And it's just like, the thing is, I don't know enough about these subjects, so I'll just watch hours and hours of him.

But it's like, his basic argument is correct, which is the pharmaceutical industry in this country spends more on lobbying and advertising than any other industry. They spend more than oil and gas. They are far more powerful in the United States than oil and gas are, which are very powerful interests. So they do all that. They absolutely control the regulatory bodies.

They control the media. They control the politicians. So that part of the argument is sound and then you just listen to this guy and you know he sounds like he knows what he's talking about i don't know the science and then you're just like to keep the needle away from my child they have they have immunity against damages they can you know just pump chemicals in your kid and get away with it does rfk jr conspiracy conspiracize about his dad he only just got into it like he got into it i think in 2013 because he read the same book i read

jfk and the unspeakable and then he like finally visited daily plaza and like after 2013 for the first time in his life and since then he's been on a on a JFK and RFK were killed by the CIA binge, which I do respect that he's, to my knowledge, the only Kennedy who will publicly say that. Which, you know, if you had family murdered by the CIA, I think you do owe them a responsibility to say that. Yeah, so they have like a silent family dinner. And then he's just like, I guess i'll just go and say it my dad and also jfk

were assassinated there's no magic bullet i'm sorry right anyway past the mashed potatoes it's like you can hear like a uh a wind blowing against the window from the direction of the grassy knoll and that's the ghost of jfk haunting their family dinners sean how many hours of rfk do you think you've watched now like five or six hours probably and i i bought his audio book he wrote a book about his own family about the kennedys so i'm like i'm like three hours deep into his audio book. Oh, man. Yeah, I hope he runs for president. I love the... Let's see if the CIA can go three for three from the field. They need to rebuild after Joe Kennedy Jr.

Yes. It's a rebuilding year. I love that Sean's Kennedy radicalization is happening before our very eyes. Just fucking six months after he's like, yeah, you know what, guys? I'm going to change my last name to Kennedy. I think it's the only way I can get this done.

And guess what? I'm going to visit the locations, and I'm going to tell you the truth. I do like that I'm just fully back to being an idpol Irishman. Supporting the fucking Irish political dynasty like I'm a fucking bought and paid for fresh off the boat paddy in Boston

shortly after the Civil War. There's like viral videos of you in grocery stores like picking up Lucky Charms boxes being like this is appropriation. Why does nobody see this? How come nobody can understand this is causing me pain? Wait to Steve's earlier point,

when the Kennedys have a rebuilding year and they have to rebuild their farm season, what they do is they go out and have a bunch of illegitimate children. And that's a rebuilding year for the Kennedys is they're establishing the next line of political office holders. Is that like a camp for the kids

they have like a trainer it helps them learn how to do war crimes later this is this is sean out of mcdonald's uh hey you want fries with that oh what just because i'm irish you think i want potatoes with my burger no i want potatoes. None of this fried nonsense. I'm a purist. Yeah, I go around St. Patrick's Day and they're like, do you want a shamrock shake? What the fuck did you just say to me?

Get your manager out here right now. Just virulently anti-Protestant. Right, right. Moving back to the Singh family, this family fucking sucks. I mean, you know, people that are in medicine should have the decency to think, I want to heal people instead of kill them with my medicine. But the Ranbaxy Company and Mulliv uh shirvinder sing don't give a

fuck about that they are born in a family with silver spoons up their asses they're the grandchildren of a pharmaceutical empire and they run it into the ground because of their hubris and ego and it's it's disgusting in chasing money and elite status they chose to poison people instead of maintain regulations to heal them it's fucking sick i mean you don't see us doing episodes of our show where it's just toilet noises for fucking two hours and us being like no this is a really good podcast we're at least trying to make the world a slightly better place with our content but if we lose another hundred patrons we will do that i'm gonna live stream me taking a shit the patreon count goes back up immediately it's giving the people what they want it slowly turns from a fucking billionaire show to just me

fucking taking shit and popping pimples and shit in the bathroom all right we should note for the listeners that the singh brothers are not to be confused with the professional wrestling duo the singh brothers uh you know two of them are pharmaceutical billionaires who are in prison and the other two are racist stereotypes thought up by vince mcmahon to uh give people a chance to boo indian people uh for you know taking their call center jobs or whatever wdwe fans are mad about when you mentioned it i didn't know what you were talking about and so i had to look up them wrestlers and at first i was like man what the fuck is this and then slowly i was like well representation does matter i mean i'm not saying i'm happy but to see cut indian men in

in american media that aren't being portrayed as as uh weaklings does make me feel slightly good it's not another aziz clone at least these guys are fucking cut it's just like the wwe if you see a wrestler who is uh not white you can set your watch to them being a horrific racial stereotype and we have vince mcmahon's a creative direction to thank for that yeah he's like uh involved in the trump campaign in some way isn't he yeah his wife is commerce secretary um she was running for senate boy what a fucking shitty country all right uh continuing on with the bio of the singh family we open with the original patriarch uh by mohan singh he was born in india 30th, 1917. He would begin by

joining his family's construction business that got the contract to build the roads in the northeast of India during World War II. Although he is considered by some to be doyen of pharmaceutical industry in India, he didn't start Ranb back see it was actually started by his cousins ranjit singh and gerbox singh ran back see is a fusion of those two names so ron from ranjit and box from gerbox which is so interesting because ran back see sounds like some fucking european nonsense if you know what i mean like when i first saw it i was like why why what is this stupid name but then i realized it was just a anagram of both their names. Sort of like GlaxoSmithKline.

Yeah. Yeah, definitely. This is fucking, I will say it is a good pharmaceutical company name. I would buy, I would buy watered down HIV drugs from them. I would,

I would see the name and I'd be like, these people sound like any other pharmaceutical company. This is probably reliable. And then I would die when my t-cell count collapsed yeah originally they would distribute drugs for a shinogi a japanese pharmaceutical company making vitamins and anti-tuberculosis drugs uh when rambaxi would default on their original loan uh by mohan singh would then buy the company on August 1st, 1953 for 2.5 lakh rupees. Bhai Mohan Singh would do a handful of predatory things to expand his empire. At one point, they were buying pharmaceuticals from La Petite Spa, an Italian pharmaceutical company. Bhai Mohan Singh would convince his allies

to besmirch the name of La Petite Spa, the Italian pharma company, and then once they went under, he would buy them at a cheap price. Although these things would certainly help build the empire, he would make his mark once he started making drugs himself. He would launch Compros. This would be an imitation of Roche Pharmaceuticals' Valium. So the reason he was able to do this was because Roche had no

patent to the drug in India. And this was his first big score, making Valium in India because they had no patent in India. By the 1970s, Bhai Mohan realized he could reverse engineer any drug and would set up an R&D facility in Mahili, India, and would make drugs such as Rosaline, Sifron, and many more. To recap what you just said, just to explain to me, so this guy, their grandfather, he was originally making his money building roads during World War II, and then he used that money to go on like a slander campaign against some pharma companies and then bought them out of bankruptcy. Is that accurate? Kind of.

That's mostly accurate. At first, he buys a pharmaceutical company that his cousin started that's just selling drugs that they're buying from this Japanese company and then later on i mean so basically if ranjit and girl box the original founders of ran backseat running it they would have probably not thought hey let's fucking run companies into the ground and then buy them to sell medicine to people in india but by mohan singh was like fuck that noise i'm gonna fucking i'm gonna build my empire here and at first would railroad companies and then buy them for the cheap but then later on realized that he could just reverse engineer the drugs and then make them himself and just like so if their grandfather was building roads

during world war ii that means he was like close to the british empire right kind of a collaborator yeah you can definitely say that his family collaborated with the british uh during world war ii the british was using india as a hub to like refuel fighter jets among a handful of other things so there was a lot of money to be made for indian entrepreneurs from the british and building roads in the northeast was huge money for them later on we're going to be talking about uh a guru that would basically rob the grandchildren of this guy by the name of gurinder singh dylan who is an uncle of these guys and that guy also his family is in the construction business and he like did that in spain but then now is a spiritual guru that 500 000 indian people uh think he's a god so uh all of the people in this story are related to money in in the worst

possible ways so by 73 parvinder the father of the two billionaires we're talking today would join ranbaxy and move up the company. From the book, it would describe how the eldest Parvinder would receive all of the Ranbaxy shares. Manjit, the middle son, got an agrochemical company and some luxury properties. Aniljeet, the youngest, inherited Max India, a chemicals company whose biggest customer was Ranbaxy. Because Ranbaxy was the largest of the three companies, the two younger brothers inherited additional funds. Continuing on from the book, Manjeet and Anujit would grow bitter and believe that they had been shortchanged due to this deal. And this is indicative of the family drama in the Singh family. I mean, all three of these kids are being given massive companies just for being the kids of Bhai Mohan Singh.

And they're already pissed off that fucking Parvinder is getting to run Ranbaxy by himself. So later on in Parvinder's time at Ranbaxy, he would butt heads with his father Bhai Mohan Singh. From the book, once again, Bhai Mohan began waging a battle against Parvinder. He accused Parvinder of violating the family settlement agreement by blocking his veto power over company matters. Their conflict was not just over the internal exercise of power, but rather over two different visions, one old and one new of India. Now, this would happen in the mid 80s. And what is occurring here is that the FDA regulation on producing generics would change. And instead of the previous model where you would have to like, go through a litany of tests to get your generics to the market the fda would make it so that if you were to file

your paperwork first you could get in the door and you would have a six month uh leeway to produce your generic before anyone else could and from my research i think parvinder saw this and went let's start fucking making every drug we can. Who gives a fuck about regulations? Let's just go. Guns a-blazing. Yeah, and it should just be noted. I mean, obviously, I think our American listeners are aware, but the American pharma market is the motherlode in terms of money. So if you can get a generic drug in there that undercuts the price of your competitors or that undercuts the price of the labeled drug like you're you're

fucking rich right off one of them especially if you're the only one on the market for like six months by the late 90s parvinder singh and the board of directors would be like we're doing this we don't care so by mohan singh would then leave the company and then he would die in 2006 uh from the book by mohan was so pissed off at parvinder, he was like, I'm not even going to go to your funeral. Unfortunately, Parvinder Singh would have cancer and die in 1999. Bhai Mohan would be so torn up that he would organize the funeral himself and make it a lavish affair. So this is the father and the son? Am I wrong on that? This is the father and the son, and the son dies. So Parvinder, who runs Ranbaxy, he dies in 99 due to cancer.

And at this time, you know, Bhai Mohan Singh says, all right, you know, fucking my son's dead, but his grandchildren should be running Ranbaxy. And so the older son, Malvinder, is who Bhai Mohan Singh says, hey, he should be in charge. But Parvinder, before he would die, says hey he should be in charge but Parvinder before he would die would be like no they're not ready they're in their early 30s they suck and he would bring on this other individual D.S. Barr who would come in to deal with who'd come in to be the CEO of

Rambexi at this time this would be the late 90s and early 2000s when ds bar would be at rambaxi and this would be one of the largest times in their history because it'd be when bill clinton would decide to meet with them and open a couple of doors that were previously closed i just want to say this par vendor seems like a smart guy i mean he recognizes this uh huge market opportunity with the fda and he also recognizes that his own two sons are dipshits and capable of running a company. And that takes a high degree of perception to see that in your own children. Let's chip off the old blog. From the book, it talks about how Parvinder was exceedingly intelligent, that like in college, he spent 10 to 12 hours in the laboratory learning his craft and making sure to be an excellent student apparently the dean would

send a letter to bai mohant singh his father saying that a student like this only comes once every decade or so so parvinder singh i think genuinely was exceedingly intelligent and cognizant of both the business mindset and the chemistry mindset to truly run a a pharmaceutical company whereas malvinder and shivender would only have the aggressive mba american spirit of expanding and trying to make dollar dollar bills if you know what i mean and as we'll see later uh partially failing if not completely failing at that too i think going to jail for the business you do is completely failing i think that's relatively fair to say so at this time we are at the early 2000s and there is a crisis in

the world that is not being solved by big pharma. And that crisis is the AIDS epidemic. And who would you guess, but the first black president of the United States decides, I got a solution to this problem. That man is William Clinton. Sean, you want to take it away? Yeah. So around 2002, 2003, the Clinton Global Health Initiative, the Clinton Foundation gets involved with the Raxbury Pharmaceuticals. And, you know, there's been a lot of reporting about the Clinton Foundation and how they were taking all this money from, you know, Gulf states and other kind of shady people who

are obviously trying to influence Hillary Clinton, who they thought would be the next president. But the story with Raxbury and them is, as Yogi mentioned, the Clinton Health Initiative was trying to get generic HIV-AIDS medications into sub-Saharan Africa. And Raxbury, under the leadership of our two subjects, Malvinder and Shivinder, started watering down a lot of their generics, including their HIV-AIDS medication.

But this kind of allegation is a little controversial because when Hillary Clinton was running for president in 2016, conservative media dug this up again, and then-Cong Congresswoman from Tennessee, Marsha Blackburn, she's now the senator from Tennessee. She has her own, you know, kind of corruption with opiate pharmaceuticals. But when she was in Congress, she wrote a report on this in 2016, a September 2016 report. Her website summarized the report's key findings, which is, the Clinton Foundation likely facilitated the distribution of watered-down HIV-AIDS medications in sub-Saharan Africa.

The distribution of watered-down HIV-AIDS medications may have increased patient mortality rate. They can't directly tie it to it, but it seems very likely. Yeah. They can't directly tie it to it, but it seems very likely. The watered-down HIV-AIDS medications were purchased with taxpayer money as a result of price agreements, some of which were likely negotiated by the Clinton Foundation. And, quote, President Clinton was personally enriched with million-dollar consulting contracts by a friend of convicted felon and Ranbaxy advocate back see advocate Rajat Gupta from 2002 to 2008 so the the point here is basically they these guys were giving you know Bill Clinton multi-million dollar consulting and other contracts and the Clinton Global Initiative was using them and steering, you know, taxpayer money, foundation money and U.N. money towards their particular generic drugs. President Clinton praised Ranbaxy's AIDS-fighting efforts to an audience of 600 businessmen in Mumbai, India in 2013. And so this was after they pled guilty to seven felonies in 2013.

They admitted lying to multiple federal health care agencies, and they were fined $500 million. It might have been before, but it was the same year is when Bill Clinton decides to go to India and praise their AIDS fighting efforts. To continue on what Sean's saying and quote from the book, Bottle of Lies, at one point, the first whistleblower to let the FDA know about Rambaxi Thakur would learn about this. He would talk to a higher up who would say, Arun went to a whiteboard and drew a diagram by region of the liability that Rambeksi faced. The United States and Canada on the bottom, Europe next, Latin America above that, India next, and ROW, rest of the world, comprising the poorest African nations on top. I'd start there, Arun said, pointing to the top. Thakur still felt that he was

groping in the dark. He needed numbers. Arun said, pointing to the top. Thakur still felt that he was groping in the dark. He needed numbers. Arun called in his assistant to help. Thakur asked the young man what percentage of the dossier submitted to regulators contained data that did not match what the company had on file. The assistant was evasive. It varies region from region. Moving forward here. In the U.S., the number was between 50 and 60%.

In Europe, it would be the same. And in India and the rest of the world, it was 100%. So that means the numbers that they gave to regulators in terms of the medicine being distributed in India and the rest of the world were all fraudulent. Continuing on with a few more quotes from the book here, the company manipulated almost every aspect of its manufacturing process to quickly produce impressive looking data that would bolster its bottom line. Continuing on, they altered test parameters so that formulations with higher impurities could be approved. They faked dissolution studies to general optimal results. They crushed up brand name drugs

into capsules so that they could be tested in lieu of the company's own drugs. They superimposed brand name test results onto their own in applications. For some markets, the company fraudulently mixed

and matched data streams, taking its best data from manufacturing in one market and presenting it to regulators elsewhere as data unique to the drugs in their markets. For other markets, the company simply invented data. I got two more quotes here and then I'll throw it back to you, Sean. Because Ranbaxy was fixated on results, regulations and requirements were viewed with indifference. Good manufacturing practices were stop signs and

inconvenient detours. So Ranaxi was driving any way it chose to arrive at favorable results, then moving around road signs, re-rating traffic lights, and adjusting mileage after the fact. In short, Rambaxi had almost no method for confirming the content of drugs in those markets. For example, the data collected by Thocker's team showed that of the 163 drug products approved in Brazil since 2000, almost all had been filed with phony batch records and stability data that did not exist. Now, this last part here is the most gross.

At one point, this is another woman that comes in, Kathy Spreen, who also became a whistleblower later on. At one point, she confronted Malvinder Singh, then president of pharmaceuticals, with her suspicions. He told her to be patient and assured her that everything would work out. But for that to happen, the company would have needed to care about the compliance and feel a sense of urgency about protecting patients. This continues on. Spreen expressed her fears about the quality of the AIDS medicine that Ranbaxy was supplying for Africa. One of the company's top medical executives responded, who cares?

It's just blacks dying. Jesus Christ. So when I say that Malvinder and Shivinder Singh are pieces of shit that knew their company was falsifying reports to sell drugs to the world and were trying to claim that they knew nothing about it. No, these leeches were exceedingly aware of the fact that the drugs that they were making at their factories were not to quality standards and they were doing it for profit.

You know, it should be noted, I found a write-up of this controversy by the heartland institute which um some listeners might know is a global warming denial fossil fuel think tank and i do want to give a minor digression because i found this so funny the heartland institute in 2012 put up billboards with photos of the unabomber along highways in Illinois, photos of the Unabomber with the caption, quote, I still believe in global warming, do you? They had to take these down, but they actually had planned out a campaign to put up billboards with the same caption, I still believe in global warming to you,

alongside billboards with pictures of Charles Manson, Fidel Castro, and Osama bin Laden. Oh, wow. And they actually, they refused to apologize for this, even though they took them down. They justified it saying, quote, the most prominent advocates of global warming aren't scientists. They are murderers, tyrants, and madmen. it saying quote the most prominent advocates of global warming aren't scientists they are

murderers tyrants and madmen and you know so of course they like they don't disclose their donors they're heavily funded by exxon mobil among others as the last time they disclosed their donors but you know of course they hate clinton so they're going to write accurate things about the clintons sometimes um but back from the tangent uh they do actually, for this Heartland Institute write-up, they interview an expert who says, during the time frame in question, the early 2000s, HIV medications were extremely expensive in the United States. Had I been focused on HIV, I would have gone to India to find my medication supply for my patients in Africa. So there's nothing inherently bad about what they

were doing, going to India, getting generics. But it's just kind of the problem is when you have Bill Clinton, you know, getting multi-million dollar consulting contracts from this Ranbaxy, a friend of the Ranbaxy advocate, Rajat Gupta from 2002 to 2008, very clearly Ranbaxy was lobbying the Clintons, donating money to the Clinton Foundation, donating, you know, putting money in the Clintons' pockets throughout various degrees. And even in like, in 2008, apparently the Clinton Foundation had to distance themselves. In 2008, the Clinton Foundation stopped buying any Ranbaxy drugs itself.

It also warned sub-Saharan African governments and others and inspire networks to take extra steps to confirm the quality of Ranbaxy's products. And it said, you know, it's up to you if you want to switch, but we recommend doing extra testing if you stick with Ranbaxy. So it's just weird that in 2008, the Clinton administration backs down on this and admits it but in 2013 bill clinton is still flying out to an audience of 600 businessmen in mumbai india uh presumably he got paid a fair fair amount of money to go out yeah no one no one at his caliber doesn't get paid to fly to a third world country come on now right in 2013 five years after his foundation admits like hey we fucked up he's

going you know rambax he is doing great stuff fighting fighting aids and all those women i gave aids to by raping them who wants to hear me play the saxophone and then like last thing i'll note on this is because this was a controversy in the 2016 election um politifact uh wrote up about kind of because the Daily Caller and some other conservative outlets leveled these accusations against the Clintons. PolitiFact showed once again how useless fact checking organizations are because they labeled this claim false, but it's really worth reading their article on why they labeled it false. And I'll give you the summarized version, basically. So they labeled it false because in 2008, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a warning against Ranbaxy.

However, the FDA's main complaint at the time was that the company had falsified test results on the stability of a handful of drugs, none of which were the HIV AIDS drugs. They blocked 30 drugs at the U.S. borders, including HIV AIDS drugs. But basically, at this time, the FDA did not accuse them of falsifying HIV AIDS drugs. Then in 2013, the U.S. Justice Department charged Ranbaxy, but none of the counts involved HIV AIDS drugs. I believe this was an epilepsy and acne medication that they'd been sent into the market. So they use that to say that because these US government agencies

never specifically called out the HIV AIDS drugs, it is false to say that the Clinton Foundation and the Clintons made money selling watered down drugs, HIV AIDS drugs to Africa. But then they actually got a correction on this from the Daily Caller, but they wouldn't walk it back, but they did include this note. In 2004, the World Health Organization had been testing Ranbaxy products. That year, 2004, World Health Organization inspectors found problems with Ranbaxy's drugs and decertified three of its HIV AIDS medications.

So that's not even true. PolitiFact's original claim. So here's how they revised their claim. I'm quoting from PolitiFact now. Put simply, since 2005, no regulator has found its HIV AIDS drugs defective or issued a recall of its products. Since 2005, the Clinton administration was working with them from 2002 to 2005. So they're acknowledging a minimum three years in which the Clinton Foundation was pumping faulty HIV AIDS drugs that were absolutely getting people killed and, you know, making good money for former President Clinton by doing it.

To go back for a moment here, at one point, an executive would show a PowerPoint that Thakur, the whistleblower, had prepared. It was entitled Risk Management for ANDA Portfolio. This would be referred to as the R&R memo that the FDA would later use to shut down Ranbaxy. Quoting from the book once again, Ranbaxy had lied to regulators, falsified data, and endangered patient safety in almost every country where it sold drugs. More than 200 products in more than 40 countries had elements of data that were fabricated to support business needs. The PowerPoint stated business needs.

The report showed was a euphemism for ways in which Ranbaxy could minimize cost, maximize profit, and dupe regulators into approving substandard drugs. At the end of this presentation, the room was silent, and then one of the board members would turn and ask the CEO at the time, can you not bury the data? Nobody responded. And then at the time, Tempest would then ask for every copy of the PowerPoint to be destroyed and for the laptop on which it was created to be broken down piece by piece. No minutes of the meeting had been created. They would eventually find that Thacker was the one that put this together and so they

to retaliate the company would accuse thocker of browsing porn sites from his office computer thocker vehemently denied doing so furious he got his network administrator to pour through the computer records and found that someone in the corporate IT department had logged into his division's servers and planted his IP address on several searches. Listen, look. I'm not against anyone watching porn while they're at work, but to use it as slander, how dare you? Piss poor. Well, it's like, I mean, he could have been like,

I didn't do it, but even if I did, y'all fucking falsified scientific data for an fda approval so i mean you could be the most disgusting depraved person at work but if you point that out it sort of makes it okay right yeah but but like how great would it be to be the guy who watches porn at work when your boss needs you to frame somebody for watching porn at work. You're like, could you get some porn on this guy's computer? Like some really depraved shit. Like, you're the expert here now.

Finally. I never felt confident in my day job until they asked me to put porn on this guy's computer. The promotion suddenly seems much more feasible now you know the the book continues on in describing uh malvinder and shivinder uh to to just give you a look at these fucking pieces of shit um inside rambaxi some viewed him as petulant and immature he was preoccupied with his own ranking on the forbes list of india's 40 richest people he and his brother shivender with 1.6 billion in assets combined had fallen from 10th in 2004 to 19th in 2005 this year was shaping up to be even worse

when malvinder seemed to blame on a on a lack of employee loyalty when told that division wasn't making its number he would yell at employees i want profit just just the level of fucking douchebaggery that when your company's not doing good enough you yell i want profit but in more more sinister deeds uh malvinder's brother shivender at one point uh you know basically they were kind of blindsided at the fact that they couldn't use the threat of force or strategic payments to get problems solved. At one point, Shivinder would block a high-profile cardiac surgeon who opposed him in a business deal from re-entering a New Delhi hospital the sing family owned the surgeon arrived at work to encounter almost 100 policemen and a full battalion of rapid action force servicemen armed with tear gas and a water tanker used for riot patrols so if you cross the fucking sing family they have the cops on retainer and they're just gonna send an assload of them to fuck you up, and, you know,

in terms of Thocker, the whistleblower, when he, you know, moves from the U.S., specifically Princeton, New Jersey, to India to work at Rainbaxy, he, at one point, is with a driver, he's with his driver, and he sees that there's traffic up ahead, and it's somebody got hit by a car, and so he decides to force his driver to pull over the side of the road so they can carry this guy to the hospital and when he gets to the hospital he pays for the guy's medical bills which the driver's like dude we shouldn't be doing this we should get out and thakur is like no man i got a fucking duty to treat people right the next day the police would come to ran back see and accuse thakur of hitting the guy that

had been on the ground because he paid for his medical bills so the uh ran back see hr would take care of that police uh scandal but like it's dirty to be a fucking businessman in india and in the case of ran back see they are riddled with just fucking family feuds and uh corruption so at this time the FDA is looking at Ranbaxy and trying to uh build their case on all of this corruption that we're talking about at first Thakur like sends them like broken English emails that they don't really respond to and then at one point heur like sends them like broken english emails that they don't really respond to and then at one point he's like all right fuck it i might get murder over this but i gotta i gotta speak out on this and the fda starts working with him around the time that the

fda finally starts putting their case together a japanese company called daichi is looking to expand and potentially work with Rainbaxy. Malvinder Singh would then convince Ube, the CEO of Daichi, to then buy Rainbaxy while the FDA was looking was Rainbixie in total, for $4.2 billion, where the Singh brothers would pull away with $2 billion on that deal. So right before the FDA is going to be like, hey, you guys are fucking bullshit, Daiichi buys the company and they kind of almost get out of it scot-free. Or so they think. I mean, if they didn't buy daichi they might actually not be in jail right now if they didn't fuck over that sheet there's a chance that they would have had to pay a fine but they wouldn't be incriminated because of it yeah i mean that's kind of what i've learned with this podcast in the justice system is like

people go down when you fuck another powerful company or powerful individual. Like, if you want to kill some people in sub-Saharan Africa, you can probably get away with that. But, you know, if you want to defraud an extremely powerful Japanese pharmaceutical company, that might have consequences for you. When Ube was concerned with the fact that Randy Banksy wasn't giving them information and thought that, like, things were off. Malvinder would tell Susome Une, people are trying to create confusion and obviously somebody's trying to bring our price down so that they can buy us at a lower price, he would tell investors. A multinational company and a leading Indian company are working in concert to bring our share price down. Babe, I'm not a shitty boyfriend. It's just that all these other boyfriends are making me look bad. Like, he's literally just like, I'm not shitty.

All these other guys are just making me look bad. At one point, Deshmukh, the company's lawyer, would threaten to tell Unai about the PowerPoint we discussed a moment ago. And Malvinder would threaten him and say, I know where you live. And Deshmukh would respond, of course you know where I live, you idiot. You've come to my house. And later on, Deshmukh would threaten that his Shiv-Sanna connections won't appreciate this. The Shiv-Sanna is a fearsome right-wing Hindu nationalist party linked to political violence.

At that point, Malvinder went, you're a womanizer. I have all the records on you. So this guy's go-to fucking threat is that like, you love pussy too much. It's like his secret move. After he powers up, that's his special move. Right, right, right.

So when Daichi would buy Ranbaxy, originally the deal would be that Malvinder as CEO would stay on for five years, but very quickly, Une and Daichi would realize, oh no, this company is fucking bullshit, and Malvender would quickly be fired he actually got replaced by a guy who they fired in short order after him it was like one of malvender's uh his like senior executive friends one thing that i learned from the book we're all fired for watching porn on their computers one thing i learned for the book was that like a lot of the people even after

associates were fired would still be loyal to the sing family so i bet that that the guy that replaced malvinder was loyal to the sing idea um with the two billion that daichi would pay for rain back see malvinder and and Shivinder would then take that money and put it into two new companies. Steven, you got more on this? Yeah, so through all of this, Malvinder and Shivinder, they ended up seeding

most of their shares in two companies that they ended up doing a fraud scheme with. Fortis Healthcare and Relagar, or is it Relagar Enterprises? And, like, well, these are the two of the biggest ones. But they ended up, so they had to kind of retreat out of these companies because Fortis said it had been placed under investigation by um indian regulators following allegations the brothers had siphoned off about five billion rupees which at the time was about 78 million dollars right from the company and so that that wasn't the only thing they were dealing with so it was following accusations by

a shareholder of doing similar things at relegare which is a financial services company so the fd had some reporting at this uh had some running reporting on this scheme at the time, the allegations. And they reported that the brothers are also kind of, they're also facing a 35 billion rupee payment that they were forced by the court to make that was related to the initial sale in 2008 of Ranbaxy. Their bankers have claimed almost all the shares they held in their own companies, which had been used as collateral for loans. So they were using the company as collateral for loans for their own personal use.

In fact, disclosing it to the rest of the board. And J.N. Gupta, who was a big shot managing director at a stakeholder advisory company slash watchdog, said of them, quote, the brothers had three major companies, Renbach, Seafordis, and Religere, and they had left or are leaving all of them. From what we have seen in all three, they never had any intention of running these companies with good governance.

So it's just like bad faith. No corporate governance whatsoever. The brothers came to international attention when they sold a majority stake in Ranbaxy to Daiichi Sankyo, as we outlined. As we were just talking about, it appeared to be going smoothly, but actually the story broke out that they had falsified data in FDA approval meetings to show that their facilities could actually produce safe accurate generic versions of drugs that were effective right in 2016 the singapore tribunal would ask the sings to pay daichi sankyoko 35 billion rupees after finding that their brothers concealed the information during the sale of the drug maker rambax is the firm in 2008 like we just mentioned and so i guess jumping it to over to the case of fortis they said they quote wanted to enable and power the board to guide the company's future without being hampered by any possible

impact from the daichi judgment and so for relegare, it was, quote, to protect the interests of the company and the stakeholders. These are the reasons why they said they were stepping away. And it didn't have anything to do with worsening allegations about further frauds that they were committing. Just to clarify, Fortis is primarily a hospital chain company in india i think yes fortis is a franchise of hospitals that are in india now and i mean the fact that they're run by these guys that have clearly uh they clearly don't care about medicine or helping people over profits is fucking lunacy yep so fortis said that the loans were made, quote, in the normal course of treasury operations. And the brothers released a statement saying, quote, we will not shy away from any and all processes, questions, clarifications that need to be addressed, and we will provide all cooperation to ensure that the truth comes forth. So they did not do that basically right and the company Deloitte was its auditor and they refused to sign off on the accounts until the loans to the Singh brothers as like individually that they're

getting from using the companies as collateral had been fully accounted for or repaid and the company just said like they kind of dithered on the question of like if they would do that and ultimately didn't and the ownership of fortis and relegare uh was just sort of in flux for a while meanwhile the share price of fortis and relegare is just like plummeting hurting their the brothers net worth uh already more than it was. And yeah, so basically they were using these smaller but still very large companies as kind of like basically their own bank. You get like relatively cheap loans by collateralizing

some of the assets of the companies for their personal use. You don't understand. we are spending billions of dollars on pornography we believe in supporting sex workers and i'm not just gonna steal by going on one of those free websites sex work is work okay yeah so the siblings would lose much of their corporate empire to debt, as Stephen has mentioned. Another funnel for a large portion of their wealth was their uncle on their mother's side is spiritual guru Gurinder Singh Dhillon, who adds the Radha-Somi Satsang-Batsang BS, one of the most powerful sects in North India. Now, the way I've understood it is that between $600 to $800 million worth of funds were funneled into Gurinder...

Let me fucking find this piece of shit's name again you know you think I'd be good at Indian names but I mean too many fuck these turban wearing pieces of shit I'm not gonna no leave it in

you know what they fucking that's what the people pay for they came from boys there'll be extra they came to india after the fucking partition went up and these fucking pakistani fucks don't fool me these inbred hicks all right it'll be like it'll be like when chapelle left the chapelle show because he saw

a white guy laughing too hard at a racist joke yogi's gonna make fun of indians and then see us laughing too hard and then they'll be like why haven't there been any episodes for three weeks um from what i understand i think that they were trying to do a offshore shell company thing with garinder sing dylan and the younger brother shivender was giving the RSSB group hundreds of millions of dollars to then later get back via not paying taxes on them to the Indian government. But like, you know, if you look at the RSSB, there's a great blog by this individual that left it who's now got something called church of the churchless preaching the gospel of spiritual independence and i mean like you know this guy uh not really a quack but

you know he's like one of them white dudes that got into spirituality and then realized that he was literally being raped for his time and money and so he was like i'm gonna get the fuck out this so is rssb a cult in india and it's taking advantage of the Indian people that are a part of it? Yes. There are a lot of individuals like this. We covered Ramde Baba on this show. three to seven hours worth of TV time. And people will be at home just watching them do yoga and give lectures. And similar to like Hugo Chavez will, you know, like Sean actually watching Robert Kennedy videos at some point, we'll just be like, you know what, this guy's right. I got to give him all my money. In the Ramde Baba episode, we talked about how at first he'd be like, if you do yoga yoga it's going to cure cancer and everything else but then later on the government's like you can't say that so he

would have people in the audience say that i did your program and it cured all my fucking ailments so it's a scam and in this case the uncle of this uh of these two billionaires stole hundreds of millions of dollars from them and when he's confronted by like hey man you you have money right he says i am penniless money is rather swamy chief moment that tells court like it's he's like i don't have any money i'm just a spiritual guy so that is how they lost a few billions of dollars but i want to make it clear that this is not unique to the Indian generic pharmaceutical industry. All of the issues we've talked about in duping the FDA and allowing your impure pharmaceuticals to enter the market, that can happen anywhere. In fact, it's happening in this

country right now. We all know that generic pharmaceuticals are sometimes shittier than name brand. We can't like really put our finger on it, but we kind of have that feeling. And the reason is, is because with cheaper oversight, you have cheaper goods. But when it comes to medicine, it should not be this way. In terms of making a product that is supposed to heal people. You know, the amount of red tape and regulations are understandable, but the FDA can't take on the load of the world doing this, but they shouldn't have to.

Medicine needs to be a part of the global health initiative and universal health care not only in this country but around the world the fact that companies know how to make medicine that won't kill you but choose not to because it's cheaper or they don't have the intellectual property on it i mean fuck off like if i if we have mickey mouse as a logo for grub stakers we're gonna get sued by disney but if we crudely draw it and say this is mickeyouse, it's okay. Like these invisible lines of what it means to be legally correct are bullshit and more people are going to continue to die. And Sean, you've got another reference on this? Yeah.

I mean, like, and just to follow up on your point, Yogi, I think, yeah, the problem is for-profit medicine where it's like the idea of generic drugs is, I mean, it seems it is better than the status quo in the United States, where you have these insanely expensive drugs that people die because they can't afford. So the idea seems good, you know, and it is good to bring in generics to bring the cost down. But the problem is, because you're still operating under a for-profit medicine system, people have the idea to cut corners like these Singh brothers and, again, kill people making their money through the generic drugs. And what I wanted to highlight in just a couple minutes here is this story. One of the ones that I heard about from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that made me go insane on vaccines.

Because when I heard this, I was like, there's no way that's fucking true. So the thing is, you might think because the Singh brothers are in jail, they've clearly lost a significant amount of their fortune. You might be like me and just assume if pharma companies were actively killing people, at least in the United States, they would get punished. People would go to jail. You just kind of trust that medicine would be safe because if they were to like go mass murder, you know, maybe in the back of your mind, you think, oh, they could probably get away with it in India or Africa, but they couldn't do it here. Well, they actually did do it here. And they did it here very recently. The company Merck, Mr-c-k in 2004 issued a sudden recall of vioxx vioxx was developed with the fda or with the approval of the fda it was supposed to be a

substitute for aspirin like an aspirin substitute apparently merc had known of potential lethal side effects even before they launched it in 1999. According to RFK Jr., the accountants at Merck determined that it would be cheaper to kill several hundred thousand people and pay the legal costs than it would be to not bring the drug to market. There's a write-up of this in the magazine The Week by Alexander Coburn in 2012. Vioxx had a TV ad budget advertising $100 million per year. It swiftly became one of Merck's bestsellers, generating over $2 billion U.S. dollars yearly in revenue. 25 million Americans were eventually prescribed Vioxx as an aspirin substitute thought to produce fewer complications however as merck's own research uh before 1999 indicated it greatly increased the risk of fatal heart attacks and strokes uh the f, Vioxx withdrew it in 2004, right after they

discovered, sorry, Merck withdrew Vioxx in 2004, right after they discovered that a top medical journal was about to publish an FDA study that had indicated the aforementioned greatly increasing the risk of heart attacks and strokes. And this FDA study said that it had probably been responsible for at least 55,000 American deaths during the time it was on the market. However, Alexander Coburn goes through a study done by an expert about a rise, a very significant rise in the amount of heart attack and stroke deaths in the United States that immediately drops off once Vioxx is removed from the market, they come up with the figure 500,000 deaths.

Wow. So 10 times what the FDA estimated. Half a million dead Americans. And I had never heard of this story. They murdered half a million Americans. Their own fucking accounting and research department told them it'll be cheaper to go kill them and they were right because vioxx pays a 4.85 billion us dollar fine nobody goes to jail 4.85 billion dollar fine in 2007 uh if it was 500 000 deaths they paid about 9 700 per death and it was cheaper for them to generate 2 billion in revenue every year killing half a million Americans

And I'd never even fucking heard of the story before this month And that's so insane to me that yeah, you can if you are a powerful pharma company You can just mass murder people right here Oh right here in the good old United States and the government's not gonna do shit The media is not gonna tell you what happened and you know, don't don't think this shit is just happening in india is what i'm saying to our listeners well it literally isn't i mean like you know rambangsi is based in india but their drugs are everywhere and you know i want to you know i don't want to leave our listeners with the traditional hey uh life sucks all right see you next time but i will say that uh in the, they talked about a doctor who had been prescribing his patients with generic medication.

And when he looked at the links between the pharmaceuticals that were making it and some of the side effects that his patients were dealing with, he was then switching to name brand products. And the book, once again, to last mention, hit A Bottle of Lies, The Inside Story of Generic Drug Boom by Katherine Eban. I really liked it a lot. I think if you want to know more about everything we've talked about, it's a very, very thorough look at the FDA and Ranbexi, the problems that have had. But if you are taking medication and you are taking the generic pharmaceutical, look into how it's made uh ask your doctor hey has this uh come from a factory that has dealt with the fda saying that this medicine may kill me and you know from the book if the doctor goes okay uh just take the fucking regular stuff at the same milligrams that also is not necessarily recommended because the name brand pharmaceuticals are potentially so much stronger than the generic.

If you're getting 30 milligrams of a generic antidepressant or an SSRI or something and you go to a name brand, it might not be suitable for your body. So unfortunately, you have to take more steps in finding what will work for you. And like everything, it's not fun, but it is a part of the work to make sure that you don't kill yourself accidentally or enable the killing of other people for your comfort. Yeah, ask your doctor if your generic drugs are listed as approved generics on the Clinton Foundation's website. And if so immediately

flush them down the toilet I was just going to say if you're SSRI if you take your SSRI and your dick still works you should be asking some questions well a depressing ending to the Merck story guess which company

was a client of Kamala Harris's lawyer husband? That's right. Merck. No, no. So the very possible future vice president of the United States, her husband as an attorney represented Merck, the company that killed half a million Americans. So you can definitely expect a big crackdown coming in their future. But lastly, to close out this episode, one thing I'm curious about, I realized we didn't say their net worth up front. The Singh brothers, they peaked with about a $2.5 billion U.S. dollar net worth in like, I think the mid or late 2000s, or maybe in

the 2010s, about $2.5 billion net worth, or $2.5 billion net worth. But of course, they are in jail and have serious legal costs. So you have to imagine that was significantly depleted. But you mentioned offshore money, Yogi. So I guess I'm just wondering, do you think they've been able to squirrel some of that out? Maybe they still have some funds hidden from prosecutors? Or what do you think their finances are looking like? And what do you think their finances are looking like and what do you think their future is looking like today i can't confirm if they if they did squirrel out some money but you know manjeet singh and anil jeet singh their uncles on their deceased father's side still run companies and if you look them up and their kids they are like we're rich and we fucking love it and our kids aren't spoiled and we're awesome but you know when malvinder and shivinder had to sell their homes to pay for some of these debts

unaljit their youngest uncle on their dad's side was the one that would buy the house so in the long run of things mohan singh bequeathed them uh ran back see but the sing family is gonna have money for generations to come and you know malvinder and shivender might be besmirched in the i mean but they're really not like i mean like you know before this episode i got no fucking idea that the drug supply to african uh people that have aids are fucking bullshit you know i mean like i remember like years ago hearing the conspiracy that like in africa they believe that they have a cure for aids in the united states and they're not giving it to africans right and you know you hear that you're like i don't know i mean i don't know and then you're like match johnson is still alive

and uh you know like how in like well what is the what's the math on that you know i mean right coincidence sure maybe yogi can i interest you in a video by rfk no no so listen all i'm trying to get across here is that i don't know exactly how much money they they funneled away but these aren't just pharmaceutical giants these are fucking mafia don thugs a fucking doctor said no to them and he said i'm gonna make a hundred cops show up where you fucking work and bring in a fucking you know riot patrol shit you nobody in their right mind that does shit like that is gonna die anytime soon by one visit to the jail fuck martha stewart's been to jail all right malvinder and shivender saying even if they didn't hide money away they're gonna be fine and by mohan singh their original patriarch is looked at as like a fucking savior

because although their drugs were you know under regulation and they killed people to many people including myself before i did the research on this episode i thought you know generic medication from indian pharmaceutical companies were something that was saving the world like you know they yeah they're reverse engineering it and and uh choosing to undercut the big pharma markets but fuck big pharma this company's doing great but it's like anyone making this much profit is fucking someone over and if it's not you it's somebody next to you and in this case it wasn't me but uh i'm not convinced that we've heard the last of malvinder and shivinder sing i mean like they got so much fucking family drama

at one point shivender would sue malvinder and he'd be like he threatened me he broke some buttons on my jacket when they were better friends they would facetime they would force their wives to facetime each other so that they could coordinate their fucking outfits some reports say that they would facetime to make sure they weren't wearing the same things but you look at fucking every photo of these fucking chooches, they're always wearing the same fucking turbans and suits. So the Singh family are parasitic leeches of the pharmaceutical industry. And, you know, no industry is pure in this day and age. But the quality and the standards of fucking medical goods needs to be a fucking plus because

as that deteriorates it's not just the lives of one another it's the rest of humanity there is no end in sight that's positive when oh yeah medicine doesn't fucking work now what we're in the fucking pandemic right now like you what medicine doesn't work you know if rain back c is the one that is like we crack the code on the fucking coronavirus vaccine i'm not taking it and then now i'm anti-vax you know now i'm watching rfk videos for fucking three hours yeah i mean it's a big problem i think and that's the real problem like i said with for-profit medicine is that in a lot of cases, it is just profitable. You can make good money killing people or getting people sick or getting people addicted.

Or, you know, watering down drugs that people need to save their lives and killing them that way. There's a lot of different ways you can just make money killing people when it comes to medicine. But that is kind of the line, though. If you're willing to profit off people's deaths, you'll probably be financially okay for the rest of your life. Did you know that one of the Singh brothers was actually able to sneak some money out when the other Singh brother came in and distracted the referee? And then the original Singh brother did a low blow to the regulators. He won the match match but the audience was booing well they're always being booing come on they're the heels in the fucking wrestling world all right you think fucking wrestling fans love the singh brothers boy i'd love if the wwe singh

brothers took a turn and they always showed up with like stethoscopes and like every fucking match is them being like what no my aids vaccine was good and was approved by the fda stone cold steve austin rolls in and is like motherfucker you think not giving medicine to people that have aids uh it's more mr t but uh you get the the fucking point. Yeah, that would be one of the great heel turns in the WWE, though, is another wrestler gets AIDS and the Singh brothers give him fake medication. And then they write his death

into the show. The heel character is a pharma CEO. They're Indian. They know what they're talking about. They're doctors, all of them. If you continue on, I will add the last piece about Honey and Barry Sherman. I know we teased it a while ago, but you know how shit works on Grubstakers. We let you get what you get.

You don't fucking tell us what to do. But thank you for joining us. Once again, we appreciate your patronage, and we really appreciate you listening to our show. This episode was very dense, and we'll have all of our sources posted on our website, grubstakers.net, so please check that out if you want to see all of the sources we used for the episode. And with that, this has been Grubstakers. I'm Yogi Paywall.

I'm Sean P. McCarthy. Thanks to our patrons for listening and for your support. I'm Steve Jeffers. Bye, everyone. Good night. Bye. Cool. Stop your quarters.

Hey, thanks for sticking around and staying to the end of the episode. This part is from our source that has been heavily edited and redacted to protect identity. It is a look into Honey and Barry Sherman's murders, as well as some more corruption within the generic pharmaceutical industry. So thanks and enjoy. Here's the story in a nutshell. I work, my boss has been working in the industry, and he knows longtime right-hand men.

Got you. And I think he's actually the trustee of the estate, or lead trustee of the estate. But as a result, I know quite a bit, and it disgusts me, and I want people to know. So with that, there's sort of two sides to this story that I can tell you. I can tell you the Barry Sherman specific stuff, but then there's stuff regarding the pharmaceutical industry and corruption there in general that I think you might be interested

in. So you tell me how you want to see it. Let's do the Barry and Honey Sherman stuff first and then we'll go into the pharmaceutical stuff. Let's start with the juice Honey Sherman stuff first, and then we'll go into the pharmaceutical stuff. Let's start with the juice gate thing. Who killed Barry Sherman? Very surprisingly, it wasn't Big Pharma. Really?

Big Pharma doesn't do killing. Just not. And the reason I can say that with confidence, besides the fact that there's no other precedent of it ever happening, is if he was ever going to be killed for something, it would have been in 2013 or 2014 when he did a deal, an illegal deal with Bristol Myers Squibb

to basically take a pay-for-delay on what was then their leading drug. It was called Plavix or Quilicadro. Gotcha. And allegedly, he took a billion-dollar payoff to basically not challenge a patent. And then the day the patent in question expired, he nonetheless launched a billion dollars of products worldwide and kind of couldn't do anything about it because, you know, what were they going to do?

We paid the public. We paid you off to stay off the market. But he broke the cardinal rule of the industry. So if anything was going to get him lax, it would have been that, and it didn't happen. So what actually got him killed, and again, this is all through, so take it with a grain of salt, but I've heard it is Barry Sherman, allegedly. You know, when you're a billionaire and you have that much money and power, the obsession isn't money, it's power. Right. And he liked to apparently do shady deals in his office at night with some less than savory characters from the underworld.

I've never heard anything of him ordering assassinations or shit like that, not to say it did or didn't happen, but definitely he played in a bunch of, call it dubious construction financing jobs with the type of character that you would associate with those types of projects. And apparently what did him in is there was a project, a big development building, I think Lorin Young in Toronto, that it was a Mizrahi development project. And I think, I believe it was a mob had a 50 million dollar mortgage on it and the property fell into trouble and the mob thought it was going to get the property basically

not for nothing for 50 million bucks but it was worth several hundred if not a billion bucks um and Barry Sherman thinking he was untouchable and did a good deal, basically took out the mob's loan. Except for the mob didn't like that very much, and that's why apparently he was latched. And it explains, A, why it was a professional job, and why they'll never actually find the killers themselves, and, two, why the wife was killed. Because it was a big pharmacy. there's no reason to lack honey.

Right, right. I remember reading during our research that at the funeral, there were several people in lawsuits with Barry and Honey Sherman at that time at the funeral as well. So he had a bunch of people that were out to get him, but none of them seemed to be inclined to murder him. So the fact that it was a professional hit job through some construction bullshit seems to make sense yeah and like the cousin like yeah the cousin's fucking crazy but the cousin's not smart enough to have pulled that off i don't think he in the documentary says how he would have killed it which is like the last fucking thing you would do if you pulled

that shit off you know yeah and i'm sort of stuff about Barry hating Honey. I'm not, I haven't heard things one way or the other. The one thing I can say is I've met both Barry and Honey Sherman. The Shermans were the leading philanthropists in that community until their death. So the interesting thing about the Sherman family is Barry Sherman, whatever you want to say about him, good or bad, was unquestionably a genius. And, you know, for all of the shady shit he did, you know, you have to look at, he did hugely advance the world of generic pharmaceuticals. Definitely.

None of his children or wife possessed a shred of his intellect. His wife was a totally crude, you know, rich man's wife. And the daughters were brainless. Like, his daughters may have been the stupidest person I've ever met in my life saying something. No, a lot of billionaires' kids are pretty big duds, so that makes sense. And he himself was a weird dude.

Like, he was a workaholic. I had a 70s, the Shermans were members of that club. And I remember every, I don't think I ever had a conversation with Barry Sherman, but I saw him every single day in the clubhouse, in the, at the table. And, like, I don't think he would be in his ski gear, but I don't think he ever actually left. And he would just be working there nonstop. And I mention it because, like, he was the most affable guy in the world and could probably

strike up a friendly conversation with a brick wall once tried to approach him and strike up a conversation like even he couldn't do it the guy was if you weren't talking about pharmaceuticals or business or science you meant nothing to him So I can see why they were a contentious family. Allegedly, the son, Jonathan, who, the oldest son, had a very contentious relationship with him. And he, I think, spent a week working at Apotex and then basically quit or was fired.

I'm not quite sure, but either way, he couldn't cut it. And he was incredibly acrimonious towards and then basically quit or was fired, I'm not quite sure, but either way, he couldn't cut it. Sure. And he was incredibly acrimonious towards the guy I mentioned before, saying that basically he stole our father from us, and when he died, and Apotex was kind of in limbo for a lot of reasons I'll get into, Jack Kay eventually initially stepped in to run it, but the Sherman on behalf of the kids.

But Jonathan Sherman asserted, fuck you, Jack. I'm taking control of the company, but he knows fuck all. And Apotex had a bajillion problems to deal with, irrespective of who was running it. So you're almost watching a Chernobyl in real time within our industry. Yeah. And to the point of your point about him being litigious, Sherman was known as the guy that would spend two and a half million bucks in court to avoid paying you 100,000 bucks, like

it was about winning for him. Right, right. And so all of Appletech, as you mentioned, had hundreds if not thousands of lawsuits against it. And what was really propping it up at the end of the day was the strength of Barry Sherman's character and the fear of Barry Sherman litigating. And the second he went, Appletech being the clusterfuck that it is, all the barbarians came to the gate, and the rat process is still playing out. That makes sense.

So, let's see. So we've covered Chiz and Honey. We've covered the Mafia killing. We've covered play that's been covered play that people look at it well in terms of General shady shit. He's done like you covered the stuff in the public domain, right? But the thing that's about the pharmaceutical industry and it seems like you've done a bit of research into the rebates are the pricing system In Canada or at least the retail pricing system, where it's tiered as a percentage of the brand. The way that it works is such that what the brand ultimately loses is usually a lot more than the generics stand to gain. And so that creates incentive to settle and do effectively pay-for-del delay deals that keep generic stuff in the market but would drive down medicine costs in the system at the expense of everyone making more money on the aggregate.

And that happened literally, like, that's not something that happens. There's obviously the big changes, like the pitted growth that I mentioned, but that happens on a micro level on a daily basis. Interesting. And I mean, Barry Sherman was the king of it, but that's pervasive throughout the industry. Right, right. Because basically you're saying that the process of making or funding the generics isn't nearly as profitable or as much competition, but it's the brand name losing the recognition

of being the brand that hurts them the most, huh? Yeah, so I'll give you a most creative example. Let's say, take Lipitor, the heart medicine, or cholesterol medicine. Let's say the brand sold for $10 a pill. The way that the pricing works in Canada, and it's not dissimilar in other countries. The U.S. is its own ballgame, but Canada and other countries are quite similar in this regard. If there's one generic on the market, not at least set, it's 75% of the brand price. The second there's a second generic, the price falls to 50% of the brand price. And the second there's a third generic or more, it falls to 25% of the brand price. And the second is a third generic or more, it falls to 25% of the brand price.

And for some of the really, really high volume drugs with lots of generics, they can fall as low as 8%. And then on top of that, and this isn't so much the pharma companies fault as it is the pharmacies and benefits managers being corrupt. When there's three generics and the price for all of them is set by the government, if you're the pharmacy, you don't have an incentive to spend one generic over another. So how do you choose which one to do? Basically, whoever pays you the most rebates under the table.

And so for the really high commodity stuff you know let's say you're getting reimbursed 25% of the brand price of that 25% you might be kicking back as much as 20% leaving you with 5% to the pharmacy for a really high volume thing so if

the brand is getting 10 bucks a pill on a net basis you might be getting 50, 50 cents rather and so the brand is getting $10 a pill, on a net basis, you might be getting $0.50. Right, right. And that applies to all the generics. And so that creates incentive for everyone to come together and say, hey, you don't want to lose your $10 and all of your volume, and you don't want to get $0.50 a pill, so how about you all stay off the market?

We'll continue selling at $10 a pill, and we'll pay you each $2 a pill under the table. Yeah, it's just a straight racket. It's just fucking corruption. It's all supplied by hundreds of drugs across dozens of countries, and welcome to the wonderful world of big generic firms. Right, right, right. Interesting. So, go on.

Oh, no, no, no, I don't mean to ask a question. Well, so one. Oh, no, no, no. My only best question. Well, so, one of the questions I have is, do you have any public sources for any of these claims that we could look at, or is this all... Yeah, so here's the best one I can give you. There's a company called AA... So, there's a company called AA Pharma that is a known affiliate and subsidiary of AvaTech. Uh-huh. known affiliate and subsidiary of Avatex. And what AA Pharma specializes in doing is effectively buying up old legacy brands, like brands that have been off patent for a while, which they have their own generic for or can develop their own generic for. Then they find all of the existing generics

and do a deal with them to keep them off the market. And then they pull the original reference brand off the market. And the thing is, to register a generic, you have to do it as a test against the original brand. And so if there's no brand sample to do it against, you can't register a new generic. So AA Pharma has something like, I don't know, 50 or so molecules. I actually did a workup on it a couple years ago just to see if there was anything we could go after.

Basically, all of these products, you can't, you can prove it without proving what's going on. So you can look at the fact that there are no longer any competition for any of these molecules and that the brands have been pulled off the market. And if you go to the, what's called NOC database, which is the Health Canada database of any drug registration, you can see for any of these molecules that it's not like there didn't used to be generics for this product. So there were generic registrations,

maybe by as many as four or five companies, but at some point in time, all of them, except for Apotex, stopped selling. Isn't that interesting? Right. The rebate system that I mentioned, you can, there actually was a whistleblower report in Canada last year about rebates in Canada, so there's a precedent for what I'm saying.

It wasn't as in-depth, nor did it explain the mechanics quite as well, but rebates in Canada have been a, what was I going to say, a, what's the word, the secret that everyone knows, the world's worst channel. Right, right. Quick question I had for you. So, like, when the news story comes out that, you know, Barry and Honey Sherman have been murdered, you know, and the cops are looking into it,

was everything you're saying people started figuring out and talking, or were some people in shock? Like, what was the reaction? Well, the thing is, the Shermans were really good at stealing billions of dollars from the system and then donating millions back to light wash their name. So, you know, if you cite that, they were these great philanthropists and supporters of everything and everyone's mind. And what they were known as the people that you went to whenever you had a problem

and needed money desperately, because they always said yes. Ah, yeah, that makes sense. So there was certainly a lot of shock. There was a lot of sadness, and with the exception of the people who knew him well or knew the industry and knew his reputation well, by and large it was considered the depth of this great philanthropist's pipe.

Yeah, I mean, that makes sense. That would be how most people... That's what billionaires are going to do it. Right, exactly, yeah. And the key word there is whitewashing your name to make it seem like you're such a great altruistic philanthropist and not the cunning uh cutthroat businessman you are yeah oh yeah one other thing on apotex you might want to know and i'm not sure he's directly responsible for it but he definitely knew so there was a scandal a couple of years ago where the cbo

or deputy ceo of apotex a guy by the name of jeremy jayce Sy was abruptly fired from his job because it emerged that his girlfriend slash mistress, Teva, was illegally feeding him trade secrets. Oh, really? So that was public knowledge. That was only half the story, though. The other half of the story, and with all the public knowledge, is that ApoTech ran into FDA issues with one of their really big production plants in India. What wasn't reported is that that plant is eventually, or at least if they do their job honestly, if regulators do their job honestly, going to need to be knocked down altogether because Jeremy Day's eyes are backhanders from the Indian construction companies that

allowed them to use a non-GMP spec type of concrete or chemical in the concrete. So, like, it's basically akin to building a factory with a sphagnum. Yeah, right, right. Wow. Yeah. So, I don't know if Sherman authorized that, but he definitely empowered data by virtue of it,

and he definitely knew about it. Right, of course. And I know about some of the generic manufacturing that goes on in India because the Indian government claimed that they're at crisis, and there's that law that says that if a country's at crisis, they can manufacture generics. And they've tried to shut it down, but essentially if they did, it would kill millions of Africans, and so nobody wants to get their hands.

No one wants their blood on their hands when it comes to kill millions of Africans and so nobody wants to get their hands no one wants their blood on their hands when it comes to the death of Africans so it's a whole fucking legal gray area because technically well they don't actually care if Africans die they just don't want to look like they're responsible right precisely precisely