A British businessman has earned £100 million in the past five years by selling licences for drugs, many of which have undergone huge price rises, The Times can reveal.
Anil Sharma, 64, is among the biggest individual beneficiaries so far identified from the exploitation of a loophole in NHS rules that has allowed companies to implement large price increases.
They have been able to avoid limits on drug profits by selling medicines under generic rather than brand names. Although he has not raised prices himself, Mr Sharma has made a fortune by acting as a middleman, obtaining licences for generic drugs and selling them to other pharmaceutical companies.
Over the past five years at least 24 of the drugs for which he has sold licences have had dramatic price rises.
These include three types of trimipramine, an antidepressant that has quadrupled in price to about £200 a packet since he sold the licences; it was as little as £11 when he first obtained it.
Another drug, a hyperthyroidism treatment called carbimazole, rose from £6.77 for a packet of 5mg tablets when he sold the licence to a peak of more than £100.
Udaya Sharma has posted photos of his party lifestyle, his car and his father’s £15,000 watch on his Instagram account, champagnesharma
Mr Sharma was able to command large sums for his licences by identifying generic drugs that had limited competition. He often held them for years before selling them at a point when their prices began to rise sharply, inflating the value of the licences. This was typically because the existing manufacturer had dropped the brand name, allowing it to escape pricing restrictions. The NHS relies on competition to set the price of unbranded generics but this leaves manufacturers free to impose huge increases when they have few competitors. The prices of many drugs rose significantly following Mr Sharma’s sale of the licences.
One pharmaceutical consultant said that without the price increases, and the potential for more in the future, many of the licences that Mr Sharma sold would have been worth less than the cost of obtaining them.
Obtaining a licence, known as a marketing authorisation (MA), from the medicines regulator typically takes two to three years and costs between £100,000 and £200,000. Applicants must compile a dossier showing how the drug would be made and produce sample batches to demonstrate its chemical stability over time before securing a licence.
Mr Sharma has run several small pharmaceutical businesses called NRIM, Primegen and Kinedexe, which have specialised in obtaining MAs to sell generic versions of drugs.
Between November 2012 and last June he sold four companies holding dozens of UK and European drug licences to the same two pharmaceutical suppliers, Auden Mckenzie and AMCo, now called Concordia International, in deals worth tens of millions of pounds.
He was also kept on as a consultant to advise on commercial strategy as part of at least one of the Concordia deals, The Times understands. For both Concordia deals his price included additional sums linked to