By: Jared Evan
The incredibly wealthy Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma, the company that pushed the opioid based Oxycontin, which addicted millions and destroyed countless lives, has a big PR problem, as all their secrets have leaked out.
The Sackler’s have long denied that the $10.7billion they transferred from their company over the course of a decade was an unlawful attempt to shield assets in anticipation of litigation over their role in the opioid crisis. It turns out they were lying.
The Daily Mail reported: a review of emails, memos, depositions, legal motions, and other documents unsealed late on Friday in Purdue’s bankruptcy proceedings show Sackler family members discussed potential litigation exposure at least as early as 2007, a full decade before they faced a new wide-ranging legal attack and significant financial transfers stopped.
They were bracing for the devastating lawsuit, which was resolved in October
A.P reported: Purdue Pharma, the company behind the powerful prescription painkiller OxyContin that experts say helped touch off an opioid epidemic, will plead guilty to federal criminal charges as part of a settlement of more than $8 billion, the Justice Department announced.
The October deal did not release any of the company’s executives or owners — members of the wealthy Sackler family — from criminal liability, and a criminal investigation is ongoing.
In response to questions from a House oversight panel last week, David Sackler, who served on Purdue’s board from 2012 to 2018, testified that neither he, nor others, anticipated vast litigation that now totals roughly 3,000 legal actions. However, an unsealed email in March 2007 with relatives, cited ‘ongoing risks’ two months before a Purdue affiliate pleaded guilty to misbranding OxyContin, adding that ‘if there’s a future perception that Purdue has screwed up on compliance, we could get murdered’.
In other developments regarding the Sackler family a series of private WhatsApp chats between members of the Sackler family first published by The Ink recently exposed the Sackler’s’ reliance on the museums they helped fund as they attempted to clear their names at the outset of the Purdue Pharma scandal. The messages, spanning October 2017 through early June 2019, reveal one of the family’s most egregious public relations strategies: reaching out to their philanthropic beneficiaries in the hopes of securing positive statements and dissociating individual Sacklers from Purdue and the opioid crisis, Hyperallergic blog pointed out.
In other words, the donations to museums like Dia Art Foundation, the Guggenheim, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the American Museum of Natural History, was basically a Public Relations ploy. Evidently, the family image is more important than the thousands of people who have overdosed on Oxycotyin.
