£6m secret factory churned out thousands of fake Viagra tablets

[emad]

The £6m secret factory that churned out thousands of fake Viagra tablets
By Sam Lister
Police found the hub of one of Europe’s biggest counterfeit drugs rings at a Wembley trading estate



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.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,175-1376406,00.html

[Pepper32]

1. Can you imagine how depressed the buyers/users would have been?

if this was not discovered that is...