Roche was the big loser in the latest quarterly report issued by Medicines Australia, an industry trade group that monitors its members. Although several drugmakers were tagged for infractions, Roche notched a pair of $200,000 fines for severe breaches of the code of conduct. All totaled, there were 11 violations, mostly involving press releases and promotional materials, committed by seven different drugmakers.

One serious infraction involved an offer to fund a nurse’s position at a local health service, but it came with a catch. In a letter to the health service, the Roche offer “was contingent on the number of patients treated with Pegasys (the hepatitis C drug), with a sliding scale of increased funding for more patients treated,” according to Medicines Australia. Roche unsuccesfully argued the offer was withdrawn after an internal review suggested it could be misconstrued.

Separately, Roche was also fined $200,000 for making misleading claims about Mircera anemia med. A complaint filed by Amgen, which sells rival drugs, cited a host of misleading claims that were made about by Roche about its drug in a poster presentation at a medical conference, on a web site promoting Mircera to health professionals and in a Mircera dosing card distributed to docs. You can read it all in the quarterly report which, by the way, notes that Roche was the subject of five of the 11 complaints investigated.