Ex-TAP Pharmaceutical Sales Manager Found Guilty

A former sales manager at TAP Pharmaceutical Products Inc. has been found guilty of lying to a federal grand jury about the drugmaker's gift-giving practices in the marketing of its lucrative prostate cancer drug, the U.S. attorney's office in Boston said Monday. A jury convicted Joanne Richardson, 37, of Tyngsboro, Mass., on Friday after a seven-day trial in U.S. District Court in Boston. She was found not guilty on a charge of obstruction of justice. The verdict against Richardson is the latest success for federal prosecutors in the sweeping probe of TAP employees' marketing practices for the drug Lupron. In 2001, Lake Forest-based TAP paid a record fine of $885 million and pleaded guilty to a criminal charge of conspiring with doctors to bill government insurers for free samples of Lupron. Prosecutors are pressing ahead with a trial of 11 other current or former TAP employees and a Massachusetts physician who have been charged in the investigation. The trial is scheduled to start April 5.