TO THOSE working for the cluster of small firms in the Wembley Commercial Centre, a dilapidated 1950s complex in the shadow of the football stadium, Allen Valentine was an unremarkable tenant running a kitchen appliance business.
A slim middle-aged man, Valentine was rarely to be seen, but the glimmer of light and the steady hum of machinery from his third-floor unit revealed that he regularly worked through the night.
It was only when a team of police arrived at the site early one morning last spring that Valentine’s real, vastly lucrative, enterprise became known. The room was no simple storage unit, but a medicines laboratory capable of producing more than half a million fake pills, including Viagra, diazepam and steroids, every day.
Valentine’s business, valued at more than £6 million from the contents of his room alone, was found to be the hub of one of Europe’s largest criminal networks of counterfeit medicines. Stacked against the walls were containers full of fake drugs, including more than 250,000 Viagra tablets and 330,000 diazepam pills, for export or sale over the internet.
The trade in counterfeit medicines is now so lucrative and carries such lenient prison sentences that pharmaceuticals experts say that it is seen as preferable to narcotics by many crime syndicates.
For Valentine, a former sales representative for Pfizer, the drug company that manufactures Viagra, the rewards were all too tempting. Just 24 hours before his arrest, he had made a cash offer for a £1.5 million Edwardian mansion on a private estate in Hertfordshire. The same day he had arranged delivery of a £26,500 Jeep Cherokee, to go with the two Mercedes and a soft-top Mazda he had bought in recent months for his wife and two of his three children. Other treats given to his children, all of whom had private schooling, included £48,000 of flying lessons for his older son, Roshan.
With his bank accounts and cars under confiscation orders, Valentine’s lifestyle took a dramatic turn for the worse last week after he was sentenced at Harrow Crown Court to five and a half years in Wormwood Scrubs.
The businessman, 44, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to supply Class C drugs and two charges involving contraventions of the Trade Marks Act and Medicines Act. Yet to the astonishment of investigators it was his infringement of Pfizer’s Viagra copyright, not his serious threat to public health, that formed the basis of his sentence.
Officers from Brent police, who had been alerted to the laboratory’s existence by a tip-off from an unrelated investigation, soon became aware of the extent of Valentine’s network. As well as hi-tech packaging machinery worth tens of thousands of pounds, they found enough raw chemicals to make a further five and a half million tablets. The factory also had a £15,000 blister packaging machine and presses capable of producing up to 1,500 tablets a minute.
Various fake brands of Viagra were also discovered, along with a number of anabolic steroids. Although some of the Viagra pills were inert placebo, others were found to be chemical copies, made up from supplies of sildenafil citrate Valentine had shipped in from India. A further 40kg of the unprocessed chemical compound, which is used for genuine Viagra, was also found in his unit. Valentine also produced two fictitious brands, Viagra Plus and Lady Viagra, which were found to have no active ingredients.
More worrying still were batches of so-called diazepam tablets, often prescribed by doctors to relieve anxiety. Tests showed that Valentine’s brand contained nitrazepam, which can have the opposite effect.
A raid on a satellite office in Watford uncovered further documentation and sacks of products described as “ready for export or onward distribution”, as well as pallets and a forklift truck. The drugs have been traced as far afield as Scandinavia, Cyprus and Turkey and there are concerns that some fake batches of sedatives may be connected to a recent spate of drug deaths among addicts in Scotland.
Yet despite the quantity of evidence gathered, Brent police, officials from the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency and the Crown Prosecution Service found that loopholes in the law left Valentine almost untouchable.
They discovered that the businessman, who grew up in India before coming to England, had already been convicted of 14 charges relating to medication fraud, including selling unlicensed anti-ulcer treatments, in 2000. On receiving a six-month suspended sentence under the Medicines Act, Valentine used the time to set up a far more sophisticated operation, moving into his 1,900 sq ft unit in Wembley and branching into Viagra.
Raj Kohli, the senior investigating officer at Brent police, said that loopholes in the law had left detectives with few ways of securing proper punishment. Valentine could not even be charged with manufacturing the illegal substances, because under law he had not “produced” anything, but simply altered the way the chemicals were stored. “The irony is that this was a serious drug infringement and public health risk, but it was only a copyright charge that really got him, ” Inspector Kohli said.
Although Valentine could be released in as little as two years, Detective Inspector Andy Chalmers, who led the investigation, said his conviction was an important victory: “This result will have a significant impact on the drugs market and is a warning to anybody involved in illegal drug manufacture: you will be found and brought to justice.”
It is believed that Valentine, who had basic chemistry qualifications, built up a knowledge of drugs while working as a sales representative for Pfizer at its headquarters in Sandwich, Kent, in 1990. He went on to teach himself about manufacturing processes from the internet and books, sourcing machinery from contacts in Bombay. Further investigation showed that drugs were not the only fake elements of his life. Valentine was found to have changed his name from Anant Babu Patel in the late 1980s. He had also adopted the title of doctor, although he had no medical qualifications.
Speaking from outside the couple’s home in Harrow, Valentine’s wife, Nila, came close to tears as she said that her husband had been misunderstood. “I am very upset,” she said. “We are all very upset. Five years is a very long time.”
Davin Pattni, 27, an associate of Valentine, was jailed for three years last week after pleading guilty to two of the conspiracy counts. A third defendant, Paul Austin, regarded by police as a low-level “gopher”, received an 18-month suspended sentence.
BITTER PILLS
The US Food and Drug Administration sounded the alarm after the number of fake drugs quadrupled, from five cases a year in the 1990s to 20 per year in 2001 and 2002
