Washington: Johnson and Johnson company executives were briefed about an outside contractor's plan to buy defective painkillers instead of issuing a recall, documents obtained by The Associated Press on Friday indicate.
E-mails sent to Johnson and Johnson last spring by contractor Inmar show the company knew of the plan to purchase thousands of packets of Motrin could "draw scrutiny," one Inmar executive said.
Congress has been investigating Johnson and Johnson's handling of problems with its Motrin tablets that emerged last year. The maker of consumer products and medicines attracted scrutiny after a slew of product recalls, most recently involving dozens of children's medicines. The communication between Johnson and Johnson and Inmar, a supply-chain management company, appeared to contradict testimony from Johnson and Johnson executive Colleen Goggins, who told lawmakers last month that the company was not aware of the plan that contractors would pose as customers to buy up the defective product.
But a memo signed by Johnson and Johnson's McNeil Consumer Healthcare unit instructed Inmar employees to "not communicate to store personnel any information about this product. Simply visit each store, locate the product and, if any is found, purchase all of the product".
Representative Edolphus Towns, a New York Democrat who chairs the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, called the documents "troubling".
Johnson and Johnson said on Friday it had turned over more than 22,000 pages of documents to the Congressional investigators, which supported Goggins' testimony.
The defective Motrin was eventually recalled in July 2009 at the request of the FDA.
