The opioid crisis in the US is inseparably interwoven with the name Sackler. The family owns the US pharmaceutical company Purdue, which launched OxyContin. The painkiller has made the Sacklers extremely rich - and hundreds of thousands of Americans dependent. Now the owner family seems to be trying to disguise the extent of their assets. ("The Drug Clan": A Portrait of the Sackler Family Read Here)
New York prosecutor Letitia James said Friday that the Sackler family had transferred around $ 1 billion (€ 900 million) to Switzerland. The transfer had flown in the investigation of Purdue Pharma and members of the Sackler family.
James had asked around 30 financial institutions doing business with the family in August to gather information to identify the property of the owner family. The documents showed "about one billion dollars of money transfers between the Sacklers, the companies they control and various financial institutions, some of which have transferred funds to Swiss accounts," said the prosecutor.
What is the actual wealth of the family?
James confirmed information from the "New York Times", but did not mention any Swiss names. At the same time, she emphasized that she had not yet received all the requested documents.
The US magazine "Forbes" estimates the assets of the Sackler family at about 13 billion dollars. The family rejects this number. Several US states, including New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina, point out that the fortune is even higher and is due to several foreign accounts.
For this reason, they reject a possible comparison with Purdue, which had agreed on Wednesday about 20 US states and thousands of communities on the one hand and Purdue Pharma with the Sackler family on the other. According to the plaintiffs' lawyers, Purdue Pharma would be willing to pay ten to twelve billion dollars in compensation, of which two to three billion will be borne by the owner family.
Expected to cost more than $ 450 billion
Purdue and the owners want to escape this one trial, which is scheduled to start in October in a federal court in Cleveland, Ohio, bringing together nearly 2,300 lawsuits. The plaintiffs are demanding compensation from numerous pharmaceutical companies for the enormous costs of the opioid crisis, for example for the health and social system. A court-filing estimate is expected to cost $ 453 billion over the coming decade.
Above all, Purdue Pharma sells the painkiller OxyContin, which is jointly responsible for the opioid crisis in the USA. Critics accuse drug companies that have deliberately obscured the addiction to opioid painkillers and promoted the mass prescription of the drugs. Millions of US citizens became addicted as a result.
Read more about the appalling effects of OxyContin in the US
In less than two decades, more than 400,000 people died of an overdose. In 2017 alone, there were about 47,600 deaths nationwide, according to the authorities.