The U.S. Supreme Court won’t hear Hi-Tech Pharmaceuticals’ challenge to the Federal Trade Commission’s $40 million judgment against it for misrepresenting weight-loss drugs and violating an injunction.
The justices’ decision not to grant Georgia-based Hi-Tech’s certiorari petition likely marks the end of a decadeslong fight between the FTC and the pharmaceutical company. In 2008, the district court overseeing the FTC’s case granted the commission’s injunction request prohibiting Hi-Tech from claiming that their supplements caused substantial weight loss without scientific evidence. The court also ordered the company to pay $15.8 million.
But six years later, in 2014, U.S. District Judge Charles A. Pannell Jr. found the company in contempt for violating the 2008 injunction, ordering an additional $40 million in sanctions against the company and a recall of four falsely advertised products.
The judgment was affirmed by the circuit court in 2019, but in 2021, Hi-Tech found a new angle to contest the judgment after the Supreme Court issued its ruling in AMG Capital Management LLC v. FTC. Hi-Tech argued that the penalty should be nullified because the justices had curbed some of the FTC’s authority to win monetary penalties in district court without an administrative proceeding first.
