The owner of the company that manufactured the PIP implants and his associates were sentenced by the courts to 4 years in prison. The company manufactured hundreds of thousands of breast implants with a silicone gel of lower quality than the one declared to the health authorities.
The health scandal of the fraudulent breast implants already has a verdict. The French courts sentenced Jean-Claude Mas, founder of the company Poly Implant Prothèse, manufacturer of the implants known as PIP, to four years in prison and to pay a fine.
The mass trial held last spring in the south of France for fraud and aggravated deception against Mas and his associates, brought by more than 7,000 women from 71 countries, also ended with sentences of between 18 months and three years for four other senior executives of the company, which sold these implants, made with an unapproved, industrial-grade silicone gel of much lower quality than declared, to half the world. They have a 30% higher risk of rupture than other implants, according to the European Commission body that assessed them.
This is the first sentence against Mas and his associates for this health scandal of enormous proportions. The 74-year-old founder of the company has also been permanently barred from working in the medical sector and from managing a company.
Mas, as his lawyer confirmed, will appeal the decision, which means his sentence is suspended pending whether or not it is confirmed. But the former king of implants had to go straight back to prison yesterday, where he is serving eight months of pre-trial detention as part of another judicial investigation that is still open, this one for “involuntary manslaughter”. It is not the only case pending against him: Mas also faces a trial for fraudulent bankruptcy and money laundering.
Many of the affected women have had serious problems with their implants because they ruptured once implanted. Mas, although he apologised to his victims for the first time at the trial, has not admitted that his product is harmful.
The company’s former financial director, Claude Cuty, has been sentenced to three years in prison, two of them to be served, and a fine of 30,000 euros. The quality director, Hannelore Font, and the production manager, Loïc Gossard, to two years in prison, one of them to be served. The head of R&D, Thierry Brinon, to 18 months in prison. These last three were accused of complicity in the charges, as stated in the sentence read before some fifty of the 7,113 women who make up the civil party to the proceedings.
The sentence against Mas and his associates is the first prison sentence, but not the only one in this health scandal. The company that certified the implants —which also considers itself a victim of fraud—, and which carried out inspections at the manufacturing plant, was held liable in another case tried in mid-November in the civil courts for failing to control the quality of the implants. It must compensate some 1,600 women with around 3,000 euros.
In Spain some 18,000 women have at some point had implants of this brand. An organisation that brings together hundreds of affected women has filed a lawsuit, which is being examined by the Audiencia Nacional, against all the links in the chain that allowed the defective implants to reach them. At the end of October, the Spanish health authorities recommended that women with PIP breast implants undergo surgery to have them removed. A decision that comes three years after the implants were withdrawn from the market and two years after France took the same measure.
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Dr. Alfredo Fernández Blanco
The plastic surgeon Dr. Alfredo Fernandez Blanco stands out in his branch of medicine, as the best breast surgeon, he is also a pioneer in the so-called secondary surgeries or sequelae. With more than 30 years of experience and thousands of successful cases, he continues to achieve the most natural results that can be expected in a cosmetic surgery operation.
