Jamaican firm Lasco is due for a huge windfall following their victory over international pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, at the Privy Council in London, recently. But the settlement has been delayed by at least six months.

Lasco’s company secretary and legal spokesman, Vincent Chen, confirmed last week that the issue, which was expected to be settled in the Supreme Court on January 18, has now been pushed back to June.

There has been speculation that Lasco could earn as much as $1 billion in compensation. But this has been discounted by sources convinced that the figure could be closer to $500 million.

Chen would not disclose even a ball park figure in terms of the payment his company expects from a determination of its losses due to an interlocutory injunction which had prevented both Lasco and Medimpex from selling and distributing their generic versions of Pfizer’s hypertension drug, Norvasc, after Pfizer claimed that the generic forms contained Amlodipine, for which the claimed it right to protect a Jamaican local patent.

“It is a considerable amount of money. We are claiming a large amount of money because we were kept out of the market for a considerable period of time,” Chen told the Jamaica Observer.

The payout represents Lasco’s expected compensation for lost earnings over the seven years in which sales of their generic product “Las Amlodipine” was halted by the injunction.

Lasco’s chairman, Lascelles Chin, noted that the drug Amlodipine was very important to Jamaicans suffering from hypertension.

“Eight per cent of Jamaicans have hypertension and most of them are very poor. They have to take that pill daily. Our price is one-eight of our competitor’s (Pfizer) which is at $120. We sell ours for between $15 and $20,” Chin explained in an earlier interview with the media.

Chen confirmed last week that the delay is due to the fact that lawyers for both Pfizer, one of the world’s premier innovative biopharmaceutical companies, and Medimpex Jamaica, the Hungarian firm which has been distributing top-grade health products locally, ranging from antibiotics to multivitamins, since the early 1980s, have asked for the delay in order to prepare themselves for the case.

He said that Lasco was not bothered by the delay in the process, “because we are satisfied that they will have to pay us with interest”.

Pfizer is to pay Lasco and Medimpex compensation for loss of sales due to the injunction, as well as legal costs owed to both companies for selling their generic forms of hypertension medicine, which contained Amlodipine, at a much cheaper rate than Pfizer’s hypertension drug Norvasc, which contained Salts of Amlodipine/Amlodipine Besylate.

Pfizer claimed that it owned Letters Patent 3247, granted by the Governor General of Jamaica in 2002, covering the invention Salts of Amlodipine/Amlodipine, which was attributed to a Jamaican lawyer, Maurice Courtney Robinson, and said to be assigned to Pfizer for protection.

Medimpex imported, sold and distributed in Jamaica Normodipine, which contained Amlodipine Besylate. Lasco imported, sold and distributed Las Amlodipine which also contained Amlodipine Besylate.

Both Medimpex and Lasco complained bitterly of Pfizer’s highhandedness in pursuing an infringement claim against them, seeking three times the actual loss for unlawful use of the patented product.

“Metaphorically, Pfizer Limited lined up the local distributors of Salts of Amlodipine/ Amlodipine Besylate and fired a shot. The rest of the local distributors cowered at the other end of the line,” was how one of the trial judges summed up Pfizer’s action.

The court eventually concluded that Pfizer’s case for an infringement of its patent had failed, for the reason that the patent issued in Jamaica to Robinson was not valid and subsisting because the original patent filed in Egypt in 1987 expired in 1997 prior to the grant of the local patent.

The Supreme Court also refused Pfizer’s application for a permanent injunction and other orders, and ruled in favour of the local firms with costs to be agreed or taxed.

At the time of the judgment, the court also ordered an enquiry into the damages suffered by Lasco and Medimpex, as a result of the interlocutory injunction granted to Pfizer under their undertaking in damages. Pfizer eventually took the case to the local Appeal Court and the Privy Council in London and lost again in 2014.