Court Orders German Firm to Pay Victims of Defective Breast Implants
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Version 0 of 1. PARIS — A French court on Thursday ordered a German quality-control company to compensate 1,600 victims of defective breast implants made by a French company about $4,000 each, according to news reports. The German firm, TUV Rheinland, granted European Union safety certificates to the implants, which were filled with an industrial-grade silicone. About 300,000 women around the world had been fitted with the implants, made by Poly Implants Prothèses. The implants ruptured at a much higher rate than the industry norm, leaking silicone into body tissues. The court in Toulon, in southeastern France, said TUV had “failed its obligation of checking, caution and vigilance” and ordered it to pay 3,000 euros, about $4,000, to each of the victims, the news reports said. Experts will now conduct individual assessments on each plaintiff, and if their cases warrant it, the plaintiffs could get more money. Cécile Derycke, a lawyer for TUV, argued that her client’s job was to approve the manufacturing process, not the finished product. According to Le Monde, the 1,600 plaintiffs — most of them from South America and France — had asked TUV to pay them about $21,500 each. Several distributors of the implants are also suing TUV, bringing the total claims against the company to $71.4 million. The health scandal emerged in 2010, after revelations that Poly Implants Prothèses had used an inferior silicone to save money on the hundreds of thousands of implants it sold in more than 65 countries. The company was closed by the authorities in March 2010. Its founder, Jean-Claude Mas, was charged with aggravated fraud and was tried in a Marseille court last spring, along with four of his former employees. The verdict against them is expected in December. More than 16,000 women have had their implants removed since the scandal emerged, but many health authorities have failed to find evidence that the leakage causes cancer. |