Pfizer and subsidiary Greenstone pay $33M in generic drug price-fixing settlement covering bid-rigging and customer allocation

Pfizer's Generic Drug Arm Is Settling a Price-Fixing Case. The Total Bill Across Defendants Is $70 Million.

Generic drugs are supposed to be cheap because multiple manufacturers compete. That competition only works if the manufacturers actually compete — rather than coordinating who wins which customer and at what price. The DOJ has spent years building cases arguing they did not.

The Greenstone Settlement

Greenstone is Pfizer's wholly-owned generic drug subsidiary. Under the settlement documented at the Generic Drugs Direct Purchasers website, Pfizer and Greenstone agreed to pay $33 million to resolve allegations covering bid-rigging and customer-allocation conduct in the generic pharmaceutical market. The total settlement across all defendants in the related litigation reached $70.75 million.

What the Allegations Cover

Customer allocation in the generic drug context means companies agreed not to compete for each other's accounts — one manufacturer takes Hospital A, another takes Pharmacy Chain B, and prices stay elevated because no one is undercutting anyone. Bid-rigging means price quotes submitted in competitive bidding processes were coordinated in advance to produce predetermined winners.

The Broader Generic Drug Investigation

The Greenstone settlement is one node in a much larger DOJ investigation into generic drug pricing that has produced dozens of indictments and settlements since 2016. State attorneys general across 40+ states filed their own consolidated complaint in 2020 naming more than a dozen manufacturers. The conduct documented spans hundreds of drugs and spans more than a decade of transactions.