Pfizer case in Nigeria adjourned on technicalities

ABUJA (Reuters) - A Nigerian court adjourned civil and criminal cases brought by the federal government against U.S. drugmaker Pfizer over technicalities on Tuesday.

The federal government and the northern state of Kano are suing Pfizer for a combined $8.5 billion and pressing criminal charges over the 1996 testing of the drug Trovan on Nigerian children in Kano during a meningitis epidemic.

Nigeria alleges that Trovan was responsible for the deaths of 11 children and caused permanent health problems for dozens of others. It also says Pfizer did not obtain proper regulatory approval for the trial and misled parents.

Pfizer denies all the charges, arguing that it was meningitis, not Trovan, that killed the children or damaged their health. It says Trovan saved lives and was as effective as the other, established drug used for comparison in the trial.

The civil and criminal cases, which are being heard separately in a federal and a Kano state court, were launched in May but have dragged on from one adjournment to the next. The courts are yet to hear a witness or tackle the substance of the matter.

On Tuesday, the federal court adjourned the criminal case until January 28. This was because in a separate offshoot of the case, Pfizer has obtained an injunction from a Lagos court stopping the government from serving criminal summons. The government is appealing and the issue has not been decided.

The federal court said the adjournment until next year was to give the Lagos court time to rule on whether Pfizer should be served criminal summons or not.

The civil suit was adjourned until December 3. The background to that adjournment was that in August, Pfizer had applied to the court to disregard a Nigerian experts' report on the Trovan test, arguing the report was biased and inaccurate.

The issue of whether to admit the report as evidence has dominated the civil proceedings since then. The parents of three of the alleged victims of the Trovan trial have applied to be defendants, arguing that if the court throws out the report their interests will be harmed. Pfizer objects to this.

The adjournment until next week was to allow time for the lawyers representing the parents and Pfizer to submit written positions on why the parents should or should not be admitted as defendants.

(Reporting by Camillus Eboh; Writing by Estelle Shirbon; Editing by Janet Lawrence)