Express Scripts Holding Co., the nation’s largest manager of prescription drug benefits, said in a statement that it is “in the process of terminating the Philidor pharmacy from our network“.
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A building on the Express Scripts campus in Berkeley, Mo.
Valeant and Philidor both declined to comment.
Pharmacy-benefit managers, or PBMs, administer prescription-drug benefits for insurers and employers, which involves processing and paying for prescriptions submitted by pharmacies. Philidor is a pharmacy that was recently associated with Valeant Pharmaceuticals worldwide (VRX) in a report from Citron Research that was peppered with allegations against Valeant.
Once Philidor had control of R&O, the suit alleges, it used R&O’s insurance credentials to sell drugs around the country, and asked R&O’s pharmacist-in-charge, Russell Reitz, to sign off on sales made by other pharmacies in Philidor’s network. Philidor had been denied a permit to operate there previous year.
Separately, two of the five independent directors of the Sequoia Fund resigned over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday, citing the board’s chairman.
The relationship is at the center of questions that investors have raised about the strength of Valeant’s operations, its accounting practices, and the disclosures of its business ties.
The stock recovered a few of its losses, and was trading higher through most of Thursday until CVS, late in the trading session, said its Caremark program was dropping Philidor.
A spokesman for CVS Health, the nation’s second-largest pharmacy benefit provider, says the company terminated its business with Philidor because it didn’t comply with terms of a provider agreement.
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In a statement Thursday, CVS said its move to stop working with Philidor came after several weeks of “monitoring and reviewing the results of recent audits of Philidor’s practices”.
