China's drug watchdog has banned its employees from owning
shares in pharmaceutical companies as part of an ongoing
anti-corruption campaign which has unearthed a host of
scandals.
"Staff members of the drug administration and their affiliated
units should not own equity shares in pharmaceutical companies
unless they leave their posts," said Shao Mingli, director of the
State Food and Drug Administration (SFDA), on Tuesday.
"This kind of wrongdoing in the past should be corrected and
those who violate the rules in the future will be sacked," he said
at an inside meeting of the administration.
The SFDA also ruled that a timetable should be worked out by its
local branches to sever remaining ties with drugs companies to
which they were once affiliated for commercial purposes.
China is undergoing a thorough reform of its pharmaceutical
industry following a bribery investigation into its top drug safety
official Zheng Xiaoyu and a number of deaths last year linked to
shoddy medicines.
Last November, one of Zheng Xiaoyu's directors at the SFDA, Hao
Heping, was sentenced to 15 years in prison for taking bribes and
Cao Wenzhuang, former director of the drug registration department
of the SFDA, was detained in Jan. 2006 on suspicion of bribery.
China's pharmaceutical industry has become a target of rising
public dissatisfaction, with fake and unsafe medicines becoming
more widespread and hospitals selling more unnecessary drugs to
patients to pad out their income.
(Xinhua News Agency February 28, 2007)