It is a complex entity. Laborex or CFAO HealthCare? It is directed by Lisse Dossot. An old Congo company register, and a LinkedIn profile instead identify NDOYE MOUSTAPHA as general director and Didier TSOMAMBET as deputy general director of Laborex Congo.
The Laborex website allows you to see things a little more clearly. Created in 1985, Laborex collaborates with the Eurapharma group, which is the health division of the CFAO group and has more than 150 Congolese pharmacists as shareholders. Who are its 150 pharmacists? Who owns Eurapharma?
The director of Laborex appeared in 1957 in the official Congolese journal as a customs expert for materials specific to pharmacy alongside the director of CFAO. He was again confirmed in this role in 1958 and 1959 alongside Mr. Mavré, a pharmacist in Brazzaville.
The Laborex establishments cannot, therefore, have been created in 1985 and have, in 1958 and 1959, performed the role of customs expert on behalf of the Republic of Congo within the French Union. This omission on the Laborex site is perhaps intended to hide the pharmaceutical distributor’s colonial past.
It is at this level that the mesh becomes more complex. Eurapharma, the leader in the sale of medicines in Africa with 1.7 billion euros in turnover in 2022, heir to the Laborex establishments in French Equatorial and West Africa, has its head office at the same address, 8 Av. Paul Delorme, 76120 Le Grand-Quevilly, France, that CFAO Healthcare and a cascade of companies involved in particular in the distribution of medicines to French overseas territories.
Jean-Marc Leccia, the President of Europharma and CEO of CFAO Healthcare is also the beneficiary of a structure, EURAPHARMA CONSULTING SERVICES, with a turnover of more than one million euros.
Jean-Marc Leccia is affiliated with the IFPW foundation and is the regional director for Europe of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Wholesalers, Inc. in the United States.
The IFPW Foundation is proud to support the Fight the Fakes Alliance, an initiative launched and chaired by the Brazzaville Foundation of Jean-Yves Ollivier, advisor and arms dealer to President Sassou Nguesso.
Jean-Marc Leccia began his professional career at Baxter laboratories, overseeing exports to the Africa-Maghreb zone. Then, he joined Eurapharma in 1991, where he was in charge of promotion activities.
In a legal announcement published in the Semaine Africaine Newspaper of September 23, 2023, it is mentioned that Laborex Congo is a limited company under Congolese law, with a board of directors and a capital of 1,076,740,000 FCFA, or 1,642,180 euros. The companies SORAPHARMA, SECA (European Cooperation and Assistance Company), and FORAPHARMA are members of the board of directors of Laborex Congo and all emanations of CFAO Healthcare. Jean-Marc Leccia is, therefore, de facto President of the board of directors of Laborex Congo.
In 2023, the companies SORAPHARMA, SECA, and FORAPHARMA had a turnover of 222 million euros, 0 euros, and 0 euros, respectively.
The SECA and FORAPHARMA companies appear like empty shells, each with zero employees and zero turnover.
On the other hand, the company CONTINENTAL PHARMACEUTIQUE, at the same address as CFAO Healthcare, with Jean-Marc Leccia and Alex Puech as beneficiaries and shareholders, had a turnover of 602 million euros in 2023. The company EPDis France, too, at the same address as CFAO Healthcare, chaired and managed by Jean-Marc Leccia, had a turnover of 369 million euros.
Everything points to the conclusion that Mr. Jean-Marc Leccia is the heir to the colonial monopoly of Laborex establishments in the French-speaking African region. It is, with SORAPHARMA and CONTINENTAL PHARMACEUTIQUE and EPDis France, the main beneficiary of the drug market in Africa. It seems that Jean-Marc Leccia is behind one of the holders of Leccia International Inc., an entity in the BVI represented by Union Privée Bancaire du Luxembourg, but we have not been able to confirm this.
However, the private banking union of Luxembourg also represented BAXTER TRADING LTD., the BVI entity of Jean-Marc Leccia’s first employer.
BAXTER laboratories were accused and convicted in France of having knowingly sold mainly between 1978 and 1985 blood products contaminated with the AIDS virus, even though processes to decontaminate these products existed.
Considering the even greater interpenetration between pharmaceutical distribution in France and French-speaking Africa, there is no reason to believe that this distribution of contaminated blood products was limited to France.
From 1988 in Africa, Jean-Marc Leccia’s professional success also coincided with the outbreak of the HIV pandemic in French-speaking Africa.
On April 24, 2024, the English newspaper The Telegraph reported in an article titled «Doctors’ bribed to use infected blood products’» that Baxter in the United Kingdom was bribing doctors to use infected blood, leading to some patients becoming infected with HIV and hepatitis C. These blood products are also used to treat symptoms of sickle cell disease, a genetic disease that primarily affects black populations.
In October 1985, France banned the distribution of unheated products for hemophiliacs to avoid contamination. However, the Mérieux Institute nationalized in 1981 and, therefore, a French public establishment, expanded abroad, so much so that in February 1986, the laboratory continued to sell its products in other countries.
According to our research, Laborex Congo, created in 1985, would have been used to dispose of excess unheated and potentially contaminated blood from France, particularly from the Mérieux laboratory. Anne-Marie Casteret supports this hypothesis of export to Africa in her book L’Affaire du sang where she reports the testimony of former collaborators of the sale of stocks of unheated blood to Africa and Greece by Mérieux laboratories.
The Mérieux Institute «was aware, from April 1985 at the latest, of the high risks of contamination inherent in the absence of heating of the product».
Alain Mérieux appears to be a regular supporter of President Sassou Nguesso. For example, in 2016, in the midst of the post-electoral crisis, he went to Brazzaville to inaugurate the Christophe Mérieux Center for Research on Infectious Diseases.
In 1989, Congo, Laborex’s stronghold, was the African country most affected by HIV with 62.5 cases per 100,000 inhabitants; a hidden contaminated blood scandal?
One of the entry points for AIDS in the Republic of Congo seems to be France via exports from Merieux laboratories distributed by Laborex Congo, as confirmed by an article in Le Parisien from November 2002:
«In 1985, when those responsible for blood transfusion had just put an end to the distribution in France of unheated blood products, which were potentially contaminated by the AIDS virus, the Mérieux Institute continued to export its risky batches to dozens of poor countries, including Botswana, Guinea, Saudi Arabia, and Congo… Hundreds of hemophiliacs in these countries received unheated and untested vials.» – Fleury, E. (2002, November 4). The contaminated blood scandal rebounds abroad. The Parisian.
In 1985, Denis Sassou Nguesso was President of the Republic since 1979, and the Minister of Health was Professor Christophe Bouramoue, a former member of the University of Montpellier.
Collectif Sassoufit 