Gulliver

Penta Investments, a private-equity group in central Europe, invests in banks, frozen foods, health care businesses, real estate and newspapers. Founded in 1994, the fund employed Alojz Lorenc, the last head of the Czechoslovak Secret Police in the Communist era. In December 2020, Jaroslav Haščák, a co-founder of Penta and the second-richest man in Slovakia, was arrested and charged with attempting to illegally obtain a set of classified wire-taps, code-named Gorilla, that were made by the Slovak Intelligence Service (SIS), that allegedly implicated him in a major corruption scandal.

Pfizer, the largest pharmaceutical company in the world, was founded in 1849. It has been prosecuted for illegal marketing and misleading advertising for a number of drugs like arthritis drug Bextra (valdecoxib), Centrum multivitamins, bladder drug Detrol (tolterodine), anti-epilepsy drug Neurotonin (gabapentin), statin medication Lipitor (atorvastatin) and kidney transplant drug Rapamune (sirolimus). It paid the U.S. government $2.3 billion in 2009 after pleading guilty to the illegal marketing of Bextra. The company was also sued in Nigeria for conducting drug trials with trovafloxacin, an experimental antibiotic, during a meningitis epidemic in Nigeria in 1996 without getting permission from their parents, dozens of whom died subsequently.