10-year jail, 3 lakh fine on firm owner

Tribune News Service

Faridkot, February 12

For selling spurious and substandard drugs, the court of Additional District and Sessions Judge today awarded 10-year rigorous imprisonment and imposed Rs 3 lakh fine on the owner-cum-director of a Nalagarh-based pharmaceutical company.

It is alleged that Sudhir Mangi, the director of Manglo Health Care, was manufacturing and selling substandard drugs of Pantoprazole, which is used to treat gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), a condition that causes gastric juices to flow upward from your stomach and into the esophagus.

It also treats conditions in which the stomach makes excess acid, such as Zollinger-Ellison syndrome.

Besides manufacturing this drug, Mangi himself was its distributor in the state.

During inspection of Rana Drugs House, a chemist shop at Kotkapura, on May 17, 2010, the drug inspector had found heavy quantity of Pantoprazole drug and chemical examination of the drug in Punjab state drugs laboratory found that the it was of spurious quality.

As Sudhir Mangi challenged this finding of the state drugs laboratory, the samples of the drugs were again sent to the Central Drugs Laboratory, Kolkata, the national statutory laboratory of the Government of India for quality control of drugs and cosmetics, for examination. The Kolkata laboratory also found the drugs spurious in June 2012.

While holding Sudhir Mangi guilty of manufacturing and selling spurious drugs, the court awarded him 10-year jail and imposed Rs 3 lakh fine while the owner of Rana Drugs House, Amit Chhabra, was acquitted by the court.

In another case, the court sentenced a chemist shop owner, Pawan Kumar of Rameana village under the Jaito sub-division, to five-year jail term for the offence of selling habit-forming drugs.