So far only Danish drugmaker H Lundbeck and Israeli generics firm Teva Pharmaceutical Industries have confirmed that they were inspected, although several other firms are thought to have been visited.
The European Commission’s (EC) explained the raids took place because it "has reason to believe that the provisions of the EC treaty prohibiting restrictive business practices and/or the abuse of a dominant position… may have been infringed.”
The inspections are the fourth to have taken place at the European offices of pharmaceutical firms since the commission began its clampdown in January 2008.
UK majors GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and AstraZeneca, which were subject to some of the earliest inspections last year, told the Wall Street Journal that they had not been visited in yesterday’s raids.