The Servei Català de la Salut claims 526 million euros from the German multinational Hartmann and the Swedish company Essity for having inflated the prices of diapers between 1996 and 2014.
Both companies were sentenced by the Supreme Court in 2019 for forming a cartel together with the Spanish Federation of Health Technology Companies (FENIN) and six other manufacturers. All together agreed to raise the prices of diapers by 50%, which were intended for the non-hospitalized adult population. Due to this fraudulent practice, the Supreme Court – at the request of the National Commission for Markets and Competition – sanctioned the 8 manufacturers, four managers and FENIN with a fine of 128 million euros.
As a consequence of this conviction, CatSalut is now claiming compensation for damages to compensate for the price it overpaid when buying those diapers.
"We calculate that the manufacturers owe the Catalan health a total of 526 million: 320 correspond to the extra cost itself and the rest, to the updating of these prices based on the inflation that took place during those 18 years", comments Albert Poch, Lawyer from the Redi law firm, which defends CatSalut.
The lawsuit, he says, was filed last September and has been admitted for processing by the commercial court number 12 of Barcelona. "We are still waiting for the response to the lawsuit from both manufacturers, so we think that the sentence will not arrive for another year and a half, approximately."
Poch explains that the conflict may arise when it comes to quantifying the amount of compensation and not so much about the offense itself, which cannot be discussed because it has already been judged by the Supreme Court.
The lawyer details that the Servei Català de la Salut has chosen to sue only two of the eight companies for a matter of procedural strategy. “Hartmann and Essity were the two companies that received the sentence first. As the responsibility for the facts is joint and several, the two companies can respond for the entire infringement and for this reason, we can demand the full amount of compensation from them”.
Poch assures that it is the first time that a Public Administration in Spain makes an economic claim as a result of a sanction imposed by the CNMC and ratified by the courts. In this sense, he encourages the other public bodies of the Spanish health system affected by the diaper cartel to follow the same path as CatSalut.
