The Competition Council has fined pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim RCV Gmbh & Co KG (Austria) with 128.470 million RON (25.81 million euros) for abuse of a dominant position on the Romanian market of medicines intended for the treatment of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), according to a press release.The competition authority found that, over 2017-2021, Boehringer Ingelheim RCV Gmbh & Co KG limited market access to the generic medicine Spiriva (cheaper) and directed patients to Spiolto Respimat, an innovative, more complex and more expensive medicine.According to the Therapeutic Guide in force at that time and the national protocol, not all patients affected by COPD have a more complex medicine as their first treatment option (dual therapy), some of them having the medicine Spiriva and implicitly its generic versions (monotherapy) as their initial indication.Boehringer Ingelheim RCV Gmbh & Co KG has carried out an intensive communication and promotion strategy to influence doctors' decisions so that they will prescribe the drug Spiolto Respimat more widely.In this way, the company intended to make it more difficult to sell competing generic drugs similar to Spiriva and to direct the revenues generated by this product to the new drug Spiolto Respimat.Both drugs are reimbursed 50% by the Health Insurance House, the difference being paid by patients.The clues that were the basis for triggering the investigation also included information received on the Competition Whistleblower Platform, a tool through which violations of the Competition Law can be brought to the attention of the authority, anonymously. The platform can be accessed at https://report.whistleb.com/ro/consiliulconcurentei.
During the past years and increasingly in the last months, Romania was subject to a sustained campaign of manipulation and informational interference of foreign origin aimed at influencing the country's public opinion and, more recently, its elections, according to a Romanian Foreign Ministry note. This campaign is still ongoing and has all the hallmarks of […]
There was no retail project completion in Q1 in Romania, but the delivery pace significantly picked up in April and May, when roughly 150,000 sqm of new schemes opened (including one super-regional shopping center – Mall Moldova – in Iasi). This area represents 80% of the entire 2024 new supply, according to data from real […]
DN AGRAR Group (BVB: DN), Romania's largest integrated livestock farm and leading producer of cow milk, closed the first quarter of 2025 with a turnover of RON 51 million (EUR 10 million), an increase of approximately 27% compared to the same period last year. The growth was fueled by an increase in both the volume […]
Romania may commission power generation units with a total capacity of 2.5 GW this year, twice the figure last year, minister of energy Sebastian Burduja said during a conference on May 22, according to Economica.net. Among the generation units to come online this year, Burduja outlined...
Romania’s Treasury sold RON 1.2 billion (EUR 240 million) worth of bonds denominated in local currency and in euros under the fourth issue of the Fidelis scheme aimed at households this year. More than half of the money was raised with the 1-year RON-denominated bonds with a 6.75% coupon (RON 430 million) and the 7-year […]
Romania hopes to submit the fourth disbursement request under the Resilience Facility (RRF) in July, after the revised RRF plan for Romania (PNRR) is endorsed by the European Commission, and to submit another two disbursement requests (out of the four left) by the end of 2026 when the Facility ends, according to the minister of […]
