Eli Lilly is suing Canadians for $500 mil cause it didn't make enough profit

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tay

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On what basis is an American corporation suing us for such an outrageous sum you ask? The $4.3 billion dollars Eli Lilly earned in profit in 2011 was not enough for the pharmaceutical giant.

Under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a company can sue another NAFTA country if that nation’s laws affect its expected future profit. In this case, Eli Lilly is “losing profit” because Canadian regulators dared to act within Canadian laws and rightly denied patents on two of Eli Lilly’s expensive drugs.

These lost-profit lawsuits by profit-hungry corporations have to stop -- otherwise, we will see the beginning of copycat lawsuits by foreign companies against Canadians. Speak out now against Eli Lilly and tell it to stop profit-motivated lawsuits like this one.
Eli Lilly: Drop your baseless, profit-motivated lawsuit against the Canadian government.

This lawsuit will cost Canadian taxpayers hundreds of thousands dollars in legal fees. And if the Canadian government loses the case, we will have to pay out $500 million dollars of our tax money to Eli Lilly. In the long run, we'll even have to pay higher prices to access Lilly's expensive ADHD and schizophrenia drugs.

It's ridiculous for Eli Lilly sue Canadian for lost profits. Eli Lilly already makes millions of dollars in Canada a year. Also, Eli Lilly is just randomly guessing how much money it is supposedly losing -- in March it was reported that Eli Lilly was going to sue Canada for $100 million dollars, but then it arbitrarily decided last month that it is losing $500 million dollars in profit instead.

This is the first attempt by a corporation to use the NAFTA clause to sue for lost profits. Corporations and governments around the world are watching this case, as this could open floodgates to more lawsuits against taxpayers because they are not making enough profits. Reports indicate that an American company may sue Canada for $250 million dollars because we are acting within our right and not letting it extract shale gas in Quebec.

Currently, the Canadian government is negotiating a number of other trade agreements, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Canadian-China FIPA, behind closed doors. By filing this case, Eli Lilly may also be setting a precedent for companies in TPP and FIPA countries to sue us as well.

We’ve gone up against big corporations using trade deals to expand their profits before, and we can stop them again. Let’s stop the flood of lawsuits against the Canadian government by corporations seeking more profits before they happen. Call on Eli Lilly now to drop its ridiculous lawsuit because it did not make enough profit....


Eli Lilly is suing Canadians for $500 million dollars cause it didn't make enough profit | SumOfUs
 
Tecumsehsbones

Tecumsehsbones

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Damn commie socialist syrup-sucking hockey-heads! How DARE they pass laws without the permission of Big Pharma!

Our Congress would NEVER do that! They know who their masters are.
 
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tay

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A timely illustration from The Seattle Times re; pharmaceuticals and pricing differences..................


Asthma — the most common chronic disease that affects Americans of all ages, about 40 million people — can usually be well-controlled with drugs. But being able to afford prescription medications in the United States often requires top-notch insurance or plenty of disposable income, and time to hunt for deals and bargains.

The arsenal of medicines in the Hayeses’ kitchen helps explain why.

Pulmicort, a steroid inhaler, generally retails for more than $175 in the United States, while pharmacists in Britain buy the identical product for about $20 and dispense it free to asthma patients. Albuterol, one of the oldest asthma medicines, typically costs $50 to $100 per inhaler in the United States, but it was less than $15 a decade ago, before it was repatented.

“The one that really blew my mind was the nasal spray,” said Robin Levi, Hannah and Abby’s mother, referring to her $80 co-payment for Rhinocort Aqua, a prescription drug that was selling for more than $250 a month in Oakland pharmacies last year but costs less than $7 in Europe, where it is available over the counter.

Drug prices in the United States are set in hundreds of negotiations by hospitals, insurers and pharmacies with drug manufacturers, with deals often brokered by powerful middlemen called group-purchasing organizations and pharmacy-benefit managers, who leverage their huge size to demand discounts.

The process can get nasty; if mediators offer too little for a given product, manufacturers may decide not to produce it or permanently drop out of the market, reducing competition.

With such jockeying determining supply, products can simply disappear and prices for vital medicines can fluctuate far more than they do for a carton of milk.

After the price of Abby Hayes’ Rhinocort Aqua nasal spray rose abruptly, it was unavailable for many months. That sent her family scrambling to find other prescription sprays, each with a price tag of more than $150.
This year the price of Advair dropped 10 percent in France, but in pharmacies in the Bronx, it has doubled in the past two years.


more

Asthma drug pricing puts a simple breath at a premium | Health | The Seattle Times
 
PoliticalNick

PoliticalNick

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Easiest solution is to withdraw from NAFTA. Should have never signed onto it in the first place. We could also pass legislation to prevent Eli Lily doing business in Canada. See how they like them apples.
 
Tonington

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Yeah, fat chance of reversing or even revisiting NAFTA in the near term. Harper has been accelerating the investment treaties we're exposed to, while other countries are having sober second thoughts about these types of agreements.

Do you know that Canada is already the 6th most sued country in the world for investment treaty claims?
 
Tonington

Tonington

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Walter said:
Means we're doing lots of international business; that is good.
Click to expand...

Yeah...do you think it means Venezuela does better than Canada? Somehow I doubt that. It means our laws make us an attractive target for corporate legal departments.
 
pgs

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Tonington said:
Yeah, fat chance of reversing or even revisiting NAFTA in the near term. Harper has been accelerating the investment treaties we're exposed to, while other countries are having sober second thoughts about these types of agreements.

Do you know that Canada is already the 6th most sued country in the world for investment treaty claims?
Click to expand...
Hmmmn wasn't NAFTA that pie in the ski the Cretian campaigned against and promptly signed into law after becoming P.M. .
Blame Harper .
 
damngrumpy

damngrumpy

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A sovereign state has the right to make its own laws and its time we made the point
or immediately withdrew from NAFTA in fact simply leave and any companies to be
affected can go to you know where. All this WTO stuff is another problem faster we
get rid of unfavorable trade regulations the better. Canada should be about and for
Canada first
 
T

tay

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Canada Being Sued for $10.5 billion over water


An American-owned water export company has launched a massive lawsuit against Canada for preventing it from exporting fresh water from British Columbia.

Sun Belt Water Inc. of California is suing Canada for $10.5 billion US, the Canadian foreign ministry said Friday.

The suit has been filed under Chapter 11 of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Sun Belt says it has been "mistreated" by the B.C. government.

The clash over exporting water goes back to 1993, when Sun Belt and Snowcap Waters Ltd., a Canadian partner, sued the B.C. government for banning bulk water exports to California. Snowcap Waters agreed to a settlement of $335,000 (Cdn).

Sun Belt did not settle with the province. The company says the B.C. government's banning of water exports from the province violates the terms and conditions of NAFTA.

The lawsuit has upset environmentalists who are angry that companies wanting to make money exporting water are using NAFTA to override environmental laws. Ottawa has 90 days to examine the Sun Belt lawsuit.

In a related development, at a hearing Thursday night in Montreal, groups concerned about exports of bulk water demanded the International Joint Commission include this recommendation when it reports to Ottawa and Washington early in the new year.

The IJC is the group appointed by the Canada and U.S. governments to manage the countries' shared water.

The problem with NAFTA's Chapter 11 is that it allows water to be regarded simply as a good or product that can be sold or traded between countries. If a country stops its export, the company proposing the commercial use could sue for compensation.

U.S. firm sues Canada for $10.5 billion over water - Canada - CBC News
 
MHz

MHz

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Tecumsehsbones said:
Damn commie socialist syrup-sucking hockey-heads! How DARE they pass laws without the permission of Big Pharma!

Our Congress would NEVER do that! They know who their masters are.
Click to expand...
Considering they were the ones who tried to eliminate phage medicine they should all be given some 'incurable disease as their fitting reward.

 
C

Curious Cdn

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How about passing a law that says "Ely Lilly is no longer legally able to conduct business in Canada" and produce whatever worthwhile products that they make as generics.

MHz said:
Considering they were the ones who tried to eliminate phage medicine they should all be given some 'incurable disease as their fitting reward.

Click to expand...

Phages are going to be saving our lives in a few years because entities like Ely Lilly refuse to develop any new antibiotics. Pure Capitalism seems to fail when it comes up against public health care. It is possible that governments are going to have to develop new antibiotics and innoculants (like the Ebola vaccine developed by our National Microbiology Lab). There isn't much money to be made saving the average Joe's life but there are king's ransoms to be made curing limp pen1ses.
 
MHz

MHz

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They can't patent an existing virus is the reason they are so set against letting that technology out. It makes cures very cheap and no superbug can ever spring up without having a 'natural enemy', a cheap one.
 
T

tay

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Over the last few years, we’ve written a ton about "corporate sovereignty" provisions in trade agreements. Technically, these tend to be called "Investor State Dispute Settlement" or ISDS provisions, but I really believe that a decent part of the reason they’re called something so boring is to stop people from paying attention to just how nefarious these provisions truly are. One of the reasons we first started paying attention to these provisions — as they were showing up in agreements under negotiation, such as the TPP and TTIP — was following a story involving the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly demanding $100 million from Canada for rejecting two of its patents.

The issue was that Canada had rejected these two patents because the company couldn’t prove that the patented drugs were actually useful. Eli Lilly claimed that Canada had no right to reject patents on that basis, arguing that it was a "dramatic" shift in how patents were reviewed, and thus it was "expropriating its property" and undermining the company’s "expected future profits."


Think about that for a second. By the time this case went to an actual tribunal, the amount that the company was demanding had ballooned from $100 million to $500 million. This battle has waged on for many years — and for Eli Lilly, this was a huge deal. Management at the company basically bet the company on continuing to get new patents, and any hiccup — even a rejection of patents for not being useful — could be a disaster for the company. The company even pushed to get Canada slammed during diplomatic proceedings in the infamous Special 301 Report for the USTR for daring to reject its patents — and the USTR complied.

Well, it looks like all of that may have been for nothing. That’s because Eli Lilly has lost entirely, and not only won’t it be getting the $500 million it wanted, but it also has to pay Canada’s $5 million in legal fees. You can read the final award down below.

Of course, some may argue that this shows that the ISDS corporate sovereignty provisions work out fine in the end, with tribunals getting things right (even if that’s not actually true in many cases), but just the fact that the Canadian government had to go through this massive and expensive process for many years just for rejecting two bad patents should show why ISDS provisions are such a problem.

In the ruling, the tribunal even notes the Special 301 report that Eli Lilly worked so hard to have call out Canada’s patenting practices, but more or less dismisses it, by noting that others, such as Mexico didn’t complain similarly:

“The Tribunal has paid particular attention to the 2014 and 2015 editions of the Special 301 Report of the USTR. In these documents, USTR notes that the United States “has serious concerns about the lack of clarity and the impact of the heightened utility requirements for patents that Canadian courts have applied recently”. This comment cannot be dismissed outright as a lobbying effort by Claimant, as suggested by Respondent. However, the Special 301 Report stands alone in the record as a complaint regarding Canada’s utility doctrine from any other State, including Mexico, in the decade since the promise utility doctrine was allegedly adopted. For the Tribunal, that silence speaks louder than the single, brief criticism contained in the USTR’s Special 301 Report.”

In other words, sure, maybe it wasn’t just because Eli Lilly heavily lobbied Congress and the USTR to attack Canada on this point, but the fact that no other country seems concerned with Canada’s standards for denying patents, it certainly looks like this wasn’t such a big deal.

Also in the ruling, there’s a focus on "expectations." Remember, a big part of Eli Lilly’s claims was how this impacted its "expected" profits. But here, the tribunal basically notes that just because Eli Lilly expected Canada to ignore its own law, it doesn’t mean that it actually enforcing its own laws is some nefarious plot:

“The record shows that at the time Claimant made its investments, it was aware that Canadian patent law required patented inventions to be useful. Eli Lilly executives testified that they understood the Canadian utility requirement to be a low threshold. In fact, it appears that the utility of Strattera and Zyprexa in Canada was taken for granted within the company. Claimant expected its patents would not be invalidated for lack of utility.

However, this perception cannot amount to a legitimate expectation. For the reasons stated above, the Tribunal has found that each of the three elements of the alleged promise utility doctrine had a foundation in Canadian law when Claimant’s patents were filed. At that time, although Claimant may not have been able to predict the precise trajectory of the law on utility, it should have, and could have, anticipated that the law would change over time as a function of judicial decision-making.”

The idea behind ISDS was to encourage investment in developing nations, where there was a fear that a sketchy government might seize a factory or something. But that’s not a problem between Canada and the US, and Eli Lilly should have been able to put on its big boy pants and recognize that maybe, just maybe, Canada can reject some of its patents, and the company doesn’t need to throw an international hissy fit. Next time, rather than betting the company on patents, perhaps the company will start thinking about business models that don’t require a complete lottery ticket.

Eli Lilly loses quixotic quest to get Canada to pay $500 million for rejecting its bad patents | bilaterals.org
 
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