Former Democratic Metro Council Member Jerry Maynard Jr. and other family members are being accused by Eli Lilly, a drug company, of attempting to steal more than $200 million.
Eli Lilly, which generated over $65 billion in profit last year, alleges that Jerry Maynard Jr., his father Jerry Maynard Sr., his sister Misha Maynard, and others allegedly tried to defraud the company by buying large quantities of a diabetes medication called Trulicity and fraudulently selling it.
The drug company said in its lawsuit that the defendants, which include 12 people, two companies, and 3 LLCs, allegedly would purchase the drug through DrugPlace, a mail-order retail pharmacy.
After buying the medication, the lawsuit said the defendants allegedly sought “rebates from Lilly for purported utilization of the medication, filtering the rebate claims through a series of intermediaries.”
By doing this, the defendants would allegedly “represent that the medication has been dispensed to patients,” which is a “necessary condition to qualify for rebates,” the lawsuit said.
According to the lawsuit, the defendants would allegedly process prescriptions for members of the Nashville church called the Church of God in Christ, a Pentecostal denomination.
At the church, Jerry Maynard Jr., who served on the Metro Council from 2007 to 2015 and lost a Democratic state Senate primary in 2022, is the senior pastor, while his father and sister are the chairman of the church’s board and pastor of operations, respectively.
The defendants allegedly did “not dispense to patients anything near the volume of Trulicity” that they claimed, the lawsuit noted.
“The vast majority of the prescriptions, dispenses, utilization, and patients identified in these rebate submissions are fictional,” the lawsuit said.
Instead of giving the prescriptions to patients, the lawsuit said the defendants allegedly would sell Trulicity to “pharmaceutical wholesalers on the secondary market.” After selling the diabetes medication on the secondary market, they allegedly falsely claimed to Eli Lilly that the drugs had been given to patients.
“Defendants’ ‘cost share program’ is a sham. Defendants–who claim to provide prescription drug coverage for a church with more than a million members–actually operate out of a nondescript two-room office,” the lawsuit said.
“The data they provide to support the rebate claims show highly anomalous prescription and utilization trends antithetical to a legitimate patient population, and the prescription-level data are unsupported by basic verifying information,” the lawsuit noted.
Eli Lilly’s lawsuit alleges that the defendants’ business model is a “front for their fraudulent rebate scheme.” The lawsuit also accused the defendants of “similarly defrauding other pharmaceutical manufacturers.”
According to the lawsuit, Eli Lilly caught the defendants allegedly creating new legal entities to duplicate their alleged scheme nationwide.
Without court intervention, the lawsuit said the “defendants’ fraud will continue to grow at Lilly’s expense, leaving lasting damage to Lilly’s relationships with its business counterparties involved in the rebate program and draining resources from Lilly’s development of critical medications.”
Eli Lilly is seeking a judge to issue an injunction to stop the alleged fraudulent scheme and “obtain damages for the harm defendants’ scheme has inflicted,” the lawsuit said.
The drug company filed the lawsuit in the United States Southern District Court of Florida.
According to WSMV, the Nashville church said, “The Church of God in Christ has no knowledge of the acts alleged in the complaint. The Church has not knowingly participated in, authorized, or condoned any of the alleged fraudulent activity described in the lawsuit.”
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Zachery Schmidt is the digital editor of The Star News Network. Email tips to Zachery at zschmidt1717@gmail.com.
Photo “Jerry Maynard” by Jerry Maynard.
