Reckitt Benckiser might sound like the name of an X-Wing pilot, but it’s actually a pharmaceutical company that has been fined $6 million for slinging a bunch of types of Nurofen that were actually all chemically identical.
You might well have bought some of Nurofen’s Specific Pain line, but it turns out you would have received just as much pain relief for your knee if you’d bought the identically priced box of Nurofen for period pain.
Reckitt Benckiser (again, not at all a minor ‘Star Wars‘ character) was taken to court in 2015 by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, with the court originally fining them $1.7 million, but the ACCC appealed the decision pushing for a higher penalty, which they won, landing the company with the $6 million fine.
Today the High Court of Australia rejected an appeal from Reckitt Benckiser, ordering them to pay legal costs and the damn fine.
Reckitt Benckiser reckons they weren’t trying to fuck anyone around:
“Nurofen did not intend to mislead consumers, however we recognise that we could have done more to assist our consumers in navigating the Nurofen Specific Pain Range. That is, to show that each of the products in the range is equally effective for the other pains indicated on the Nurofen Specific Pain Range packaging.”
It almost seems like you could just release one product that says on the packaging that it does all of those things instead but, hell, we can’t all be marketing people.
Source: The Australian.
