A federal judge asked if members of the Sackler family used bankruptcy laws to protect family assets as part of the settlement with the government over their company’s role in the explosion of opioid epidemic, Reuters reports.
Senior Judge Colleen McMahon of the Southern District of New York, a Clinton appointee, specifically sought information about $10 billion the Sacklers removed from Purdue Pharma between 2008 and 2018. The Sacklers left the Purdue board of directors in 2018, and the company declared bankruptcy in 2019.
As part of the settlement, the Sackler family agreed to pay $3.5 billion into a fund for victims; the balance of the fund’s $8.5 billion would come from the company, which had an earlier settlement in a similar case in 2007 when it settled a lawsuit accusing it of mislabeling OxyContin and other products to downplay the addictiveness of the drugs. Around half a million Americans have died of opioid overdoses since 1999.