Chile's three pharmacy giants rigged medicine prices — emails exposed the pact

Chile's pharmacy market had three big chains: Farmacias Ahumada, Cruz Verde and Salcobrand. After a price war in 2006–07 squeezed their margins, the three secretly agreed to stop competing. Between December 2007 and March 2008 they coordinated increases on more than 200 medicines, many of them cheap chronic-care drugs (Parkinson's, epilepsy, diabetes, asthma). The court later described the pattern as '1-2-3': one chain raised a price on day one, the next matched it on day two, the last on day three. In 79% of the increases, prices converged within a single day.

The pact unravelled in May 2008, when the Health Ministry publicly denounced the coordinated rises. The FNE, Chile's competition authority, opened an investigation, and the tribunal later reconstructed the agreement from executives' emails and price records. FASA confessed in March 2009, cooperated with the prosecutor, and settled for about US$1 million. Cruz Verde and Salcobrand denied the collusion for four years. In January 2012 the TDLC convicted both and imposed the maximum fine the law allowed: 20,000 UTA each — roughly US$19 million, about 3.5% of their 2007 pharmaceutical sales.

The scandal was public and political: protests and 'funas' — including stones and animal viscera thrown at stores — a boycott call for World Health Day 2009, criminal complaints against the chains, and a bill sent to Congress to punish collusion with prison. FASA's controlling family cashed out: the chain was sold to Mexico's Casa Saba in 2010 for US$637 million, passed to Alliance Boots in 2014, and returned to a group of Chilean investors in 2023.

Consumers waited 17 years for compensation. A class action filed by Sernac in 2013 ended in a US$2.6 million judgment against the three chains, and in August 2025 Farmacias Ahumada paid a further 980 million pesos (~US$1 million) to nearly 34,000 consumers under a final settlement. The case also inspired Chile's 'farmacias populares' — municipal, non-profit pharmacies that began in Recoleta in 2015.