Sanctions could be introduced for breaking terms of pharmaceutical shipments

The Parliament's Legal Commission has endorsed a bill introducing sanctions for the failure to observe contractual obligations for shipping medicines, in attempt to curb increasingly frequent cases where winning bidders of governmental contracts break their terms. The endorsement came despite an earlier Government's refusal to approve the bill. Democrat MP Valentina Stratan, who is one of the bill's authors, noted that bidders do everything to win the contracts but often fail to meet their obligations when it comes to shipping the product. “Often it's not the doctors or managers of hospitals who are to blame for the failure to find the needed drugs, but rather the pharmaceutical contractors that evade their contractual obligations”, said Valentina Stratan. She added that the bill's goal is to distribute the responsibility equally among the parties, because there were also cases when hospital managers failed to pay up. Valentina Stratan said she could not explain to herself the Government's refusal to approve the bill, especially after it was endorsed by the Ministry of Health. Parliament will have the final say on this.