Jamaican Court of Appeal also dismisses Lasco’s claim to having fresh evidence

Durrant Pate/Contributor

The Jamaican Court of Appeal has dismissed a petition brought by Lasco Distributors and the local subsidiary of international pharmaceutical company, Medimpex, seeking an increase in their multi-million-dollar Supreme Court judgment.

Both companies were awarded multi-million judgments in their longrunning legal battle with international pharmaceutical giant, Pfizer Limited. In November 2017, Supreme Court Judge, Justice Vivene Harris awarded special damages to the local firms but they both appealed her ruling on the basis that they should have been awarded much more.

Lasco was awarded J$273 million while Medimpex was awarded J$5.3 million. Lasco sought US$490 million in damages and Medimpex US$11.5 million. In dismissing the appeal, the local appellate court found that the procedure used by Harris for assessing the damages in favour of the two appellants was consistent with loss suffered by them in their impasse with Pfizer.

Details of the ruling

According to the court, “her (Harris’s) findings were based on credible evidence, and therefore, her conclusions on these matters should not be disturbed. Similarly, her conclusions in relation to damages for the post-injunction period should not be disturbed. There is no basis to set aside the learned judge’s decision on the interest rate that she ordered to be applied to the damages”.

The Appeal Court, in its judgment, acknowledged that “the rate that the parties had agreed to be applicable to damages that were calculated in US dollar does not automatically mean that she (Harris) erred in applying it to an award in Jamaican dollars. Not only did the parties do the calculation themselves, being well aware of the change in the currency, but they calculated the interest on the US dollar before converting it to Jamaican dollar”.

The Appellate Court held that, “for those reasons also, the evidence that Lasco proposed to have admitted, having been available to them at the time of their making the calculations and before the delivery of the judgment, does not constitute fresh evidence. The application to admit the Bank of Jamaica Domestic Currency Weighted Interest Rates as fresh evidence is refused”.

The court declared that the complaints by the appellants in this appeal must, accordingly, fail. As such the Jamaican Court of Appeal ruled that the application for the admission of fresh evidence is refused and that the appeals by each of the appellants are dismissed.

The court awarded costs of each appeal and on the fresh evidence application in favour of Pfizer.

History of the case

Both companies sued Pfizer in 2005 and sought damages from the company for preventing them from selling a generic form of the hypertension drug, Norvasc. The matter arose from an injunction granted to Pfizer in 2005, which remained in effect until 2012 when the United Kingdom-based Privy Council upheld rulings by the local courts in favour of Lasco and Medimpex.

Pfizer had contended that the Jamaican firms violated its patent when they started selling generic versions of Norvasc in the early 2000s. But Lasco and Medimpex challenged the matter in court and won.

The local companies claimed that they suffered damages when they were barred by the court order from distributing Norvasc. In November 2017, the Supreme Court ruling ruled in favour of the appellants but they appeal the ruling.