MARSEILLE - The head of a French company accused of selling substandard, mislabelled breast implants defended his product in court on Friday, denying that the homemade gel used to fill them posed a danger to women.
On the third day of his trial, Jean-Claude Mas, the founder and long-time chief executive of Poly Implant Prothese (PIP) acknowledged that since 1995 he had used industrial-grade silicone in implants sold across the world that regulators had never approved.
But he said his formula, which did not match the labelling of the product, was no more harmful than the silicone used by competitors.
“I didn't allow risks to be taken,” Mas, 73, told the packed court in the southern city of Marseille, as hundreds of victims named as plaintiffs looked on. “I reject the word 'dangerous'.”
“This gel is no more dangerous than any other. That's what the biocompatibility tests found. All of them are irritants, but not toxic.”
The PIP scandal triggered a global health scare and a flood of lawsuits after erupting in 2011. Some 220 of the more than 5,000 individual civil suits filed against the company have come from women outside France.
Although the French government has recommended that women with PIP implants have them removed due to high rupture rates, health experts say no concrete link has been established between the implants and breast cancer.
Mas's comments in court were consistent with those made to police before his 2011 arrest, when he bragged that his homemade formula of silicone gel was “perfect”.
Some 300,000 of the implants were sold around the world in the course of a decade before they were withdrawn in March 2010.
Mas and four executives from PIP - once the third-largest global supplier of breast implants - are charged with aggravated fraud and risk five years each in prison plus fines. Their trial is expected to last until mid-May.
“To hear that this gel isn't dangerous is shameful and intolerable,” said one plaintiff, Audrey Pourret, who had her PIP implants removed after they split.
“I had to leave the room because I had a hard time listening to his lies ... I'm 23 years old and this man shattered my life.”
Half the French women with PIP implants, or nearly 15 000, have already opted for removal, according to the government. - Reuters