Yet another item about government concerns over collusion between drugmakers. This time, the South Korea Fair Trade Commission has fined GlaxoSmithKline $2.6 million for conspiring with a drugmaker based in Seoul back in 2000. Glaxo allegedly offered Dong-A Pharmaceutical the exclusive right to sell its Zofran anti-nausea drug and the Valtrex anti-viral, Agence France Press writes.

In return, the KFTC maintains Glaxo demanded that Dong-A stop selling a cheaper generic version of Zofran which had been introduced two years earlier, and never produce or sell any drugs that could compete against Zofran and Valtrex. “With the cheaper generics made by Dong-A taken off the market, the financial burden on patients and on the government’s health insurance budget has increased,” Kim Jun-Ha, a KFTC official, told AFP.

The FTC said in a statement that it estimated Glaxo had made wrongful gains of about $14 million and that the “the two firms shared benefits that were to go to consumers”. Dong-A was fined about $1.85 million. Glaxo’s South Korean unit called the decision “very regrettable” and “inappropriate” and expects to appeal “We simply exercised our legitimate patent rights,” the drugmaker said in a statement. Last year, by the way, Glaxo bought a stake in Dong-A, which is the leading prescription and over-the-counter maker in South Korea (back story).

The decision comes as the European Union steps up its investigations of similar deals between drugmakers. Last week, EU anti-trust regulators disclosed a probe of Johnson & Johnson and Novartis to determine whether whether they illegally conspired to delay the entry of a generic version of the Fentanyl painkiller from entering the Netherlands (read here).

The Korea Fair Trade Commission has been stepping up its enforcement of the pharmaceutical industry. Last month, the agency fined the South Korean units of several large drugmakers - Sanofi, Bayer, AstraZeneca, Novartis and Johnson & Johnson’s Jannsen Pharmaceutica - for giving kickbacks to doctors (see this).

bribe pic thx to donhankins on flickr