After a decade of legal squabbling, Biogen has agreed in principle to pay $900 million to settle a lawsuit filed by a former employee who alleged the company paid kickbacks to hundreds of physicians to boost sales of its multiple sclerosis drugs.
The settlement ends a long-running battle that began in 2012, when a former Biogen sales manager named Michael Bawduniak filed a whistleblower lawsuit claiming the company ran thousands of speaker and consulting programs that were not educational session, but actually blatant marketing tools. As a result, he alleged, the drugmaker caused Medicaid to overpay for medicine.