Bribes, sex and espionage in a dark story
(by Beniamino Natale – HANDLE – July 4, 2014)
The investigation underway in China on the pharmaceutical multinational GlaxoSmithKlin (GSK), accused of systematically bribing doctors and officials to promote their products, is shrouded in a cloud of mystery.
Certainly little is known: that four executives of the multinational company have been arrested; whereas GSK's head of operations in China, Mark Reilly, is not being allowed to leave the country; that two people, British citizen Peter Humphrey and his Chinese-American consort Yu Yingzeng were arrested and charged with obtaining "confidential information by illegal means". The two will be tried in August in secret, as Chinese investigators explained to US and British diplomatic representatives.
The story begins in January 2013, with an anonymous email sent to the management of GSK, which is based in London, in which the management of the Chinese section of the multinational is accused of habitually using illegal means to gain access to the Chinese market, the new Eldorado of international business in which the rules are few and often unwritten. The author of the message mentions the names of some doctors and officials who would have benefited from the attention of the GSK. The multinational hires Humphrey and Yu - who founded and run a private investigation company in Shanghai - to find out who sent the message. Suspicion falls on Vivian Shi, an expert in contacts with the Chinese bureaucracy who has already worked for other large companies in the sector such as Johnson & Johnson, and who at the end of 2012 left the GSK due to unclarified differences with the management. A few weeks after starting the investigation, Humphrey and Yu are arrested and have been kept in solitary confinement ever since. According to British investigators, quoted by the Financial Times, "the contract with the GSK was the trigger that triggered the arrest". A family friend claims that the two "were unintentionally involved in a war". In a statement dictated by the prison, and released by the BBC television network, Humphrey said he believes that the allegations of the mysterious author of the email are "totally credible".
To add a spicy note to the story, the anonymous accuser sent a video to the GSK offices in London in recent days in which Mark Reilly (who is separated) and his Chinese girlfriend (who is single) are portrayed in intimacy.
TO
