Ponte’s lead lawyer, Rosemarie Arnold<\/a>, said that many of the documents would not be subject to attorney-client privilege because they were seen by people not connected to Sanofi’s legal department, as well as for other reasons.<\/p>\n“She was bullied by them,” Arnold said of Sanofi, which is accused in Ponte’s suit of creating a hostile work environment after she made her claims of wrongdoing there. “And now they’re trying to bully her some more.”<\/p>\n
Among the documents that Ponte had in her possession is an email from one of Sanofi’s in-house lawyers, Berg, written on March 21, 2013, after he was asked to review some contracts that had been flagged by Ponte as having potential legal issues.<\/p>\n
Berg’s email, which is in court records, has the subject line “contracts with Accenture.”<\/p>\n
Berg, writing that he was giving “a relatively quick review,” said in the email that “the contract has almost no meaningful deliverables, is poorly constructed and incorrectly mentions Regulatory Review, with no mention of Legal review, when in fact the issues are most likely to create legal risk (kickback) rather than regulatory.”<\/p>\n
“My initial overall take is that the contract violates almost every principal of financial stewardship and good business practices, with few deliverables, an outlandishly short time frame, no consideration as to the clear legal issues in these types of engagements with customers,” Berg wrote.<\/p>\n
Despite Berg’s apparent concern, Ponte alleges the company pushed for approval of the contracts.<\/p>\n
Accenture and Deloitte are not named as defendants in Ponte’s lawsuit. Accenture declined CNBC’s request for comment when Ponte’s suit was filed last year. Deloitte said at that time that “we are confident our contracts and services were entirely appropriate.”<\/p>\n
CNBC also has spoken to a former Sanofi contractor, who on Tuesday of this week described how then-Sanofi executive Godleski allegedly pressured her to enter incorrect codes for purchase orders so that the companies that were the subject of the questionable contracts, Accenture and Deloitte, could start getting paid.<\/p>\n
The ex-contractor, Jean Kazimir, said Godleski, who is named as a defendant in Ponte’s lawsuit, wanted the companies to get paid even though the contracts hadn’t been approved by Sanofi’s legal department, and despite that the purchase orders would have been for goods instead of for the services that were detailed in the contracts.<\/p>\n
“I knew something wasn’t right,” Kazimir told CNBC. She said she had told Godleski he would need to put his request in writing, but that he never did so.<\/p>\n
Kazimir’s account is also cited in a federal class action lawsuit filed in Manhattan by shareholders against Sanofi. That suit alleges the company and then-CEO Viehbacher misled investors and inflated Sanofi’s stock price by touting sales growth of its diabetes drugs “while omitting disclosure of the illegal practices used to achieve those sales.” Those alleged illegal practices include the same ones at the center of Ponte’s state court lawsuit.<\/p>\n
Sanofi “funneled tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars in disguised payments to consultants Accenture and Deloitte, which according to whistleblowers served as middlemen in a scheme to induce pharmaceutical retailers and hospitals to favor Sanofi’s diabetes drugs over competing drugs from Novo Nordisk,” the Manhattan federal court suit claims. The whistleblowers are identified in the suit as Ponte and Kazimir.<\/p>\n
Godleski’s lawyer declined to comment on Kazimir’s allegations.<\/p>\n
Sanofi has asked a federal judge to dismiss the shareholders’ lawsuit, arguing that the plaintiffs have failed to lay out sufficient legal grounds for their action.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sanofi whistleblower lawsuit kicks into higher gear by Dan Mangan CNBC.com Friday, 20 Nov 2015 | 2:38 PM ET Read the full article at: http:\/\/www.cnbc.com\/2015\/11\/20\/sanofi-whistleblower-lawsuit-kicks-into-higher-gear.html A whistleblowing former paralegal at drug giant Sanofi is now claiming she was aware of “many instances” where Sanofi lawyers destroyed documents to avoid turning them over to opponents in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,4,1],"tags":[46,44,45],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rosemariearnoldreviews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rosemariearnoldreviews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rosemariearnoldreviews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rosemariearnoldreviews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rosemariearnoldreviews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/rosemariearnoldreviews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":95,"href":"http:\/\/rosemariearnoldreviews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94\/revisions\/95"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rosemariearnoldreviews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rosemariearnoldreviews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rosemariearnoldreviews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}