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Faulty Implants Women Must Repay Compensation

Faulty Implants Women Must Repay Compensation

Women who were fitted with faulty breast implants must repay compensation after a French appeals court reversed a ruling that a German safety standards body was liable.

The court said TUV had "fulfilled its obligations" in certifying the implants made by French firm Poly Implant Prothese (PIP), which it said conformed to safety rules.

A worldwide scare was triggered when they were subsequently found to contain substandard, industrial-grade silicone gel.

TUV had been deemed liable in 2013 by a lower French court, which ordered it to pay millions of euros in compensation to distributors and victims

The agency maintained it was never its job to check the actual implants, and their task was only to inspect the manufacturing process.

And the appeals court in the southern city of Toulon found TUV and its French subsidiary had "fulfilled the obligations incumbent upon them as a certifying body (and) committed no error engaging their criminal responsibility."

"This decision absolves TUV of any responsibility and confirms that the decision of the Toulon commercial court in 2013 was unfounded," said Cecile Derycke, a lawyer for the body.

The scandal first hit the headlines in 2010 after doctors noticed abnormally high rupture rates in PIP implants and gathered momentum worldwide in 2011, with some 300,000 women in 65 countries believed to have received the faulty implants.

Six distributors of the implants from Bulgaria, Brazil, Italy, Syria, Mexico and Romania sued TUV for a total of €28m (£20m).

Nearly 1,700 women who were fitted with the implants - most of them from South America but also from France and Britain - also asked the German firm for €16,000 each, taking the total claims against TUV to €53m (£38m).

The German body was ordered to compensate "the damage (done to) importers and victims".

The lower French court ordered the German body to compensate the women with €3,000 (£2,130)) each while waiting for individual medical or financial assessments to be conducted on each plaintiff and TUV paid out a total of €5.8m (£4.1m).

Laurent Gaudon, a lawyer for the victims, said: "With this decision the victims find themselves among the accused and will have to pay the money back to the certifier which, according to the appeals court, has done its job perfectly over the past 15 years."

A source close to the safety body said the women "will technically have to pay back this money but no decision has been taken on a request for reimbursement".

PIP's founder, Jean-Claude Mas, was convicted of fraud and sentenced to four years in jail in 2013 over his company's use of the cheaper industrial-grade silicone.