Yesterday I noted that several unanswered questions remained over the role of AZ's Compliance & Ethics Leader in relation to the Bucket of Money newsletter scandal. (New readers start here. Summary: AZ was caught making dubious unjustified marketing comparisons between its cancer drug Arimidex and a rival brand, Femara.)
The main question was, What was the role of Andrea Paskman, the executive responsible for compliance on Arimidex in the production of all this non-compliant marketing and sales material?
AZ pr rep Emily Denney called me up and although she declined to answer the seven specific questions that were circling in my head yesterday, she did, in essence, clear Paskman's name of any association with the fiasco. This is what she said:
"As you know we have not been getting into a lot of detail" on why this whole thing occured because it's a "personnel matter" and therefore "confidential." But, Denney said, "This was an unapproved newsletter, it did not go through the approval system. That speaks for itself [in terms of] its evolution and how it came to be."
And then she reiterated that AZ had done its "full internal probe" and already "taken the appropriate action."
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