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# 2 Ex-drug Company Employees Arrested in Kickback Scheme
- URL: https://www.fdaweb.com/2-ex-drug-company-employees-arrested-in-kickback-scheme/
- Published: 2016-06-13T12:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-14T21:09:16.000Z
- Author: David McFarland
- Tags: Drugs, #legacy-id-D5135919

Former Insys Therapeutics district manager **Jonathan Roper** and former sales rep **Fernando Serrano** have been arrested and charged with two counts each of violating the anti-kickback statute involving the painkiller Subsys (fentanyl). After their arrest, they were brought before U.S. magistrate judge **Kevin N. Fox** in Manhattan. The defendants “corruptly induced doctors to prescribe millions of dollars’ worth of fentanyl through thousands of dollars in kickbacks disguised as phony educational programs,” Manhattan U.S. attorney **Preet Bharara** is quoted in a [release](https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/former-pharmaceutical-company-employees-arrested-participating-fentanyl-kickback-scheme?ref=fdaweb.com) as saying.

In order to market the fentanyl spray product, the company established a speaker program. However, many of the events that Roper and Serrano organized and attended were predominantly social gatherings at high-end restaurants in Manhattan that involved no education about the fentanyl spray and no slide presentations, the government contends. “Many of the speaker programs also lacked an appropriate audience of healthcare professionals,” it says. In order to make these speaker programs appear legitimate, sign-in sheets were frequently forged by adding the names and signatures of doctors not present.

Under the speaker program, two doctors in 2014 were paid $147,000 and $112,000, respectively, for writing $3 million and over $2 million worth of the fentanyl spray prescriptions, the government says. “It was well understood among \[company\] employees that doctors were selected as speakers in order to induce these doctors to prescribe large quantities of the fentanyl spray, and Roper explicitly instructed the sales force he supervised that this was the case,” it says. “For example, on or about 5/5/2014, Roper sent an email to certain sales representatives in which he expressed displeasure that certain doctors who were speakers were not prescribing sufficient quantities of the fentanyl spray...”