All Major Pharma Companies Implicated in Bribery Schemes, New Report Says

Pfizer, J&J, Eli Lilly, BMS, AstraZeneca, GSK, and more all engaged in systematic bribery schemes, according to decades of OECD reports. That’s the finding of a bombshell new study led by Jillian Kohler from the University of Toronto in Canada, and published in the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics. According to Kohler, bribery often had the approval of high-ranking managers and involved complicated corporate structures such as subsidiaries, shell companies, and third-party vendors to make these practices look legitimate.

These practices were often ignored when discovered by company employees, indicating that problems with bribery in the pharmaceutical sector are likely ingrained in current business practices.

The authors identified three distinct types of bribery cases. First, there were schemes designed to increase profits without directly undermining the quality of industry drugs such as kickbacks, lavish “hospitality,” and fraudulent consulting fees. Second, companies bribed government officials, inspectors, and regulators in order to sale drugs that did not meet basic safety standards. This led to the distribution of falsified, adulterated, and unapproved drugs. Third, some cases involved both profit increasing schemes and regulatory evasion, including off-label marketing of drugs for unapproved uses.

Pharmaceutical industry corruption of psychiatry and medicine is a well documented problem. A 2012 study found that corporate crimes committed by the pharmaceutical industry are “common, serious, and repetitive.” This study reviewed cases of illegally marketing drugs for off-label use, misrepresentation of research results, concealing harms caused by industry products, and Medicare and Medicaid fraud. Another study found that the majority of payments made from the pharmaceutical industry to physicians likely constitute illegal kickbacks. Research has also shown that corporate policies are largely ineffective at changing the corrupt practices of the pharmaceutical industry, especially when profits from these crimes far outweigh the penalties.

Harm Linked to Pharma Industry Corruption

Previous research authored by Kohler and funded by the UK Department for International Development found that bribes and illicit payments made by the pharmaceutical industry have a significant negative impact on public health. This includes distorting healthcare priorities, misuse of resources, promotion of poor drug choices, increased costs, unnecessary treatment, the erosion of public trust in healthcare institutions, and worse patient outcomes as a result of healthcare decisions driven by profit rather than patient needs.

For example, Whistleblower Ed Piggot revealed that Forest Pharmaceuticals bribed a principal investigator in the STAR*D study, the largest antidepressant study at the time. This resulted in an overestimation of Celexa’s effectiveness, an antidepressant produced by Forest Pharmaceuticals, which likely increased service user exposure to a less effective, possibly harmful drug.

A 2017 study found that two thirds of patients in the US saw a physician that received pharma industry payments while only 5% were aware that their doctors had these industry ties. Research has found that these kinds of payments affect prescribing practices and are linked to increased Medicare costs and patient complaints.

Study Details

The goal of the current work was to investigate the prevalence, characteristics, and patterns of pharmaceutical industry bribery. To achieve this goal, the authors examined reports from the OECD Working Group on Bribery published between 1999 and February 2025. In order to be included in this research, reports had to involve pharmaceutical companies being implicated in foreign bribery schemes around prescription or over-the-counter drugs. This included industry bribes linked to securing regulatory approvals, influencing prescribing patterns, and increasing drug sales. Reports involving bribery related to medical devices were excluded. The authors performed a thematic analysis on the OECD reports to identify patterns across various cases. In total, the researchers identified 22 bribery scheme investigations involving dozens of countries.

OECD reports indicated that pharmaceutical companies in five OECD member states had been investigated for foreign bribery schemes involving 30 countries. The US had the most investigations (14 cases), followed by Germany (three cases), Denmark (three cases), Greece (one case), and Italy (one case). Nineteen companies were investigated, with 13 explicitly named in the reports:

• Biotest
• Novartis
• Johnson & Johnson (J&J)
• Pfizer
• Teva
• Eli Lily
• Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS)
• SciClone
• Nordion
• AstraZeneca (AZ)
• GlaxoSmithKline (GSK)
• Sanofi
• Novo Nordisk

The longest bribery scheme detailed in these reports lasted for 11 years. On average, investigated schemes lasted nearly five years (4.74). The average time between the detection and prosecution of a bribery scheme was 4.6 years. The OECD reports detailed illicit payments totaling $12,633,989. Implicated companies had to pay $1,111,225,911 in sanctions related to bribery, including $586,263,414 in fines, $447,237,274 in returned profits, and $77,545,872 in prejudgement interest. Courts imposed 10 years and three months of prison time related to these bribery investigations. The authors note that this data does not reveal the actual scale of bribery, as these are only partial figures related to discovered schemes.

The use of subsidiaries, smaller companies controlled by larger pharmaceutical companies, were a common method of concealing bribes. Of 19 investigations that explicitly included information on the use of subsidiaries, 12 reported they were used in an attempt to conceal bribery schemes.

The authors discovered several patterns in the bribery cases investigated by the OECD. Bribes were often disguised as sponsorship. This included adding lavish shopping sprees and family travel to the costs of attending professional conferences. Companies used falsified or manipulated clinical research to funnel money to doctors they had bribed to increase prescriptions of their products, disguising these bribes as research payments. Some companies would offer steep discounts and credits to distributors, who would then use the excess capital to bribe healthcare professionals to increase prescriptions and public officials to secure government contracts. Bribes were frequently disguised as consulting fees, speaking fees, and charitable donations. Intermediaries, such as shell companies, were common in funneling bribe money to healthcare professionals, government officials, regulatory agents, and inspectors. Several companies also exploited the UN oil-for-food project to bribe Iraqi officials.

The authors acknowledge several limitations to the current work. OECD reports are only made around bribery cases that became public through official investigations. Smaller companies, those operating in places with less oversight and regulation, and those that made settlements that included confidentiality agreements would not have appeared in these reports. Enforcement varies by jurisdiction, meaning bribery in areas with less vigorous enforcement may have not been officially reported or prosecuted. While the data here offers insights into patterns of bribery perpetrated by the pharmaceutical industry, it cannot speak to the scale of this problem.

The authors conclude:

A Pattern of Corruption

Research has shown that the pharmaceutical industry uses various tactics to ensure profits with seemingly little regard for public health. This includes a system of “ghost management,” by which industry determines what studies get published while passing off industry propaganda as legitimate research. Studies have detailed how industry creates conflicts of interest throughout the medical field by making payments to textbook authors, FDA advisers, DSM panel members, physicians, peer reviewers, and patient advocacy groups. Research has found that industry money corrupts continuing medical education by using these seminars to uncritically promote industry products to healthcare professionals. Industry sponsorship of clinical trails has repeatedly been shown to bias results towards positive findings for industry products. Industry and the FDA have worked together to use mob tactics to silence whistleblowers that were attempting to expose corruption. As a result of rampant corruption and conflicts of interest, some experts have called evidence based medicine “useless” and “an illusion.”

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Kohler, J., Khan, A., & Bowra, A. (2026). Bribery and the Global Pharmaceutical Industry: An exploration of patterns and penalties in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development Reports. Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, 1–11. (Link)