 It's December 2013 and a French company executive is being sentenced to four years in prison. The event marks the end of a criminal investigation into probably one of cosmetic surgery's most famous cases of scandal and fraud. The executive is Jean-Claude Marre and he was the main driving force behind a truly horrifying case of profit over safety. The scandal puts several thousand people at risk of serious injury and heightened cancer, as well as betraying the trust and defrauding their customers from all over the world. My name is John and welcome to another episode of Scandal and today I'm looking at the repulsive PIP Implant Affair. Forward. Okay so before we start I should say I won't be talking about the reasons why some people get implants or the wider plastic surgery industry as it's a personal choice. Some cosmetic surgeries restore a person's body after life-saving surgeries like a mastectomy. As such the end user so to speak of the implants represents a multitude of reasons for going under the knife. Although I have never had any kind of cosmetic surgery myself I can understand the distress and suffering the victims must have been subjected to during this scandal. Oh and pronunciation warning there are a few French words that I'll be butchering throughout the course of this video. Well that's enough of me gibbering let's start our story at probably the most suitable point at the beginning. Background. Meet Jean-Claude Marre. Born in France in probably the worst years to be born there 1939. Much of his early life is unknown but snippets of his adult life career can be pieced together. According to French daily Le Monde Marre in the 1960s and 1970s worked for US pharmaceutical giant Bristol Myers Squibb or BMS. Marre's career then went to the meat trade. Some say that he was a butcher but this claim has been disputed. Officially he has said himself that he worked in the dried sausage and wine industry. It was during this time he became associated with surgeon Henry Arion a man famed for introducing breast implants into France in 1965. Arion's implants were the world's first inflatable prosthesis. Basically bags that were filled with saline solution. Now I should say that different news agencies have reported Marre working in the meat industry before working for BMS and others have reported Marre working in meat after BMS. But the important takeaway is regardless of chronology Marre's career involved a substantial industry change. So just remember he knew about sausages being a medical rep and knowing Henry Arion. Basically it boils down to sales and product and after meeting Arion the product was implants. Laboratories Arion founded by Henry were one of the major players in the implant industry. This was in the 1980s and Marre must have seen this as a prime business opportunity but his mentor would tragically die in a plane crash in 1991. But this didn't apparently stop him as the same year he founded PIP or Poly Implant Prostise. Upon the company's founding Marre hired 120 employees and set about travelling the world to some of the biggest markets for breast implants one of which was the UK and this doesn't surprise me one bit. Anywho's PIP's business plan worked pretty well. Hundreds of thousands of implants were shipped around the world and an estimated 100,000 were produced each year making the company the third largest silicone implant manufacturer in the world. The product was different to the saline filled implants that Henry Arion had pioneered. PIP would use solid silicone implants which are seen as advantageous over saline ones as they apparently look and feel more natural. Interestingly PIP would later on in the 90s also make saline implants as well well the reason for this I'll go into in a little bit. All of their products were manufactured at Le Lacenie Sommier in southeastern France and I know I butchered that one. However problems were on the horizon for the company when one of its biggest markets would disappear from PIP's grip. FDA bans silicone implants. It's 1992 and the US Food and Drugs Administration launched a voluntary moratorium on the sale of silicone based implant products. That is not good news for PIP who were at the time predominantly selling silicone products. You see American manufacturers of silicone implants had been racking up an ever increasing number of lawsuits throughout the 1980s in regards to their implants rupturing. Essentially silicone was banned in one of PIP's biggest markets. Well Ma sought to find alternatives. This led him to start using hydrogen implants in 1994 followed by those saline implants in 1996. So far so good but things would come crashing down in 2000 when an inspector from the FDA was sent to the PIP plant in France to carry out an inspection. This was on the 15th of May and shortly after the inspector returned home to the United States a warning letter saying the implants were adulterated and citing at least 11 deviations from good manufacturing practices was sent to PIP. So needless to say this would close the US market door to PIP. Quickly the company also withdrew its hydrogel implants presumably because they could also not prove the safety of those ones either. Velocity US markets severely hit PIP's finances and the ever resourceful Ma found a way to make their product immensely more profitable. Just by altering a few of their products ingredients. Just buy a little bit. You see the silicone used in implants has to be of medical grade which is expensive. Very expensive and is usually externally sourced. Ma thought why not use the much cheaper industrial grade material and manufacture it in house. It was nearly 90% cheaper after all. This reduced materials cost would allow the company to weather the storm of losing the US. I assume no one outside PIP's management knew of the potential damage that can be caused by industrial silicone. So let's look at what silicone is used for and you can use it for pretty much any job that requires a water resistant and durable sealant. It's used in cookware like this set I have. It could also be used in rubber keypads or a lubricant or even molds. Basically it's used everywhere. But vitally this is all the industrial grade silicone and you don't want this stuff inside your body. Needless to say PIP didn't do any testing of a new formula of the silicone. For the surgeons using the implants little could be differentiated between the two silicone types. Only a small superficial change could be seen but only if the two are sat side by side. So it wouldn't take long for the first issues with PIP implants to start rearing their ugly head. The scandal discovered. Within just two years of the silicone change reports of premature rupture started appearing in the markets that PIP had a stake in. In 2003 lawsuits began piling up at PIP's door but the company continued to grow the business as they are able to keep these incidents out of public knowledge. The cut price tag of PIP's implants created a greater demand. For example in the UK in the mid-2000s the cost per unit was in the region of £100. The going rate at the time for other brands was closer to 700. The age old adage remains true if it's too good to be true and it probably likely is. By 2006 plastic surgeons across the world had seen a startingly high number of PIP implants rupturing within three years. For context the expected life of them should have been at least 10 years which personally even that doesn't seem long enough. Around the same time the company was forced to pay 1.4 million euro to British victims. But this would just be the tip of the expensive iceberg. By 2009 the number of failed implant cases was in the thousands and as such in France alone 2,000 women had filed lawsuits against the company. The French agency François des Securités Sanitaires des Products des Sanites launched an investigation in March 2010. Around the same time PIP was put into liquidation by now it was at a loss of roughly 9 million euro. The investigation quickly unraveled Mars deception and revoked the company's CE mark banning the sale and export of the PIP implants. They found that the implants contained bisolome, siloprene and rhodosil. Chemicals that are used as fuel additives or in the production of rubber. The criminal case. Criminal proceedings for Mars and PIP were just around the corner. Mars was arrested in June 2010 in Costa Rica but not for what you might think. It was for dangerous driving and after being handed a court date for November the same year he fled the country back to France landing himself a spot on the Interpol list. But he was jumping out of the frying pan into the fire. It was discovered during interviews with mine November 2010 that from 1993 the company was facing a silicon shortage. Mars had ordered staff to hide the truth and was quoted in saying we did it for 13 years about a problem but what was this? They were almost right from the start to the company going into the business of defrauding their customers with their products containing 75% homemade silicone mixed with 25% medical grade silicone. The non-safe materials bought off the books and via proxies to avoid suspicion. Needless to say with these revelations French authorities were recommended the case be put to the police for criminal proceedings. In December 2011 a woman died in France of anaplastic large cell lymphoma. She had been implanted with the PIP breast implant. The death was apparently linked to PIP implants. Shortly after on the 23rd of December 2011 the French government advised the removal of all PIP implants in French women as a preventative measure. This would cost roughly 60 million euro. However strange in the UK the medicines and healthcare products regulatory agency did not give out the same advice. Instead they asked to seek inspection by a medical professional and seek help if the implants are suspected of rupture. Personally this wouldn't feel very confidence inspiring. By 2012 more women were linked to having at least eight cases of breast tumours but the number would quickly rise to 20. There was more than enough now to charge Jean-Claude Ma and on the 26th of January 2012 at 7 o'clock in the morning he was arrested in the home of a friend under the charge of fraud. Unsurprisingly this would result in a trial. The 74 year old put up the defence of I know I was doing illegal stuff but it wasn't dangerous honest. A proven method to guarantee a conviction and that's what happened and after a month long trial in April 2013 Ma was sentenced to four years in prison with a few other PIP executives seeing prison sentences but of lesser time. He was also slapped with a 75,000 euro fine in addition to being permanently banned from working in medical services or running a company. It seems pretty light to me as an estimated 300,000 people are affected by the dodgy implants. This issue won't go away anytime soon either with many countries taking the line of the UK with no replacement instead just regular checkup. Anyway TUV had certified the French implant manufacturing process and in 2013 TUV Rhineland was found liable by a French court and made to pay 1,600 women whose breast implants had ruptured compensation although TUV has still denied any knowledge of the ingredients used at PIP. 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