Whistleblower faces murder plot charge: Man who exposed price fixing by international drugs firm 'tried to arrange murder of wife'

STANLEY ADAMS, the whistleblower who exposed illegal price-fixing by a major international drugs company, was charged yesterday with attempting to get another man to murder his wife.

Magistrates at Yeovil, Somerset, remanded Mr Adams, 66, in custody on a charge of unlawfully attempting to get Anthony Cox to murder Deborah, his second wife, between 1 August 1992 and 29 April this year.

His first wife, Marilene, committed suicide in 1975 when he was jailed after revealing the illegal activities of Hoffmann-La Roche, the Swiss-based international drugs company.

Mr Adams, of Chilthorne Domer, near Yeovil, who was born in Malta, was an executive with Hoffmann-La Roche. By 1972, he had become the company's world product manager for bulk vitamins, widely used in the manufacture of food, drugs and animal feed.

In 1973 he told the EEC Commission that the company was breaking Common Market regulations forbidding firms from abusing their dominant position by market-sharing practices and price-fixing.

What followed was a nightmare. A year before reporting Hoffmann-La Roche, he had left the company and set up his own business in Italy.

While visiting Switzerland, he was arrested for breaching trade secrets and giving economic information to a foreign power.

While he was in prison, his wife committed suicide after being told he would serve 20 years.

He jumped bail when he was released several months later and left Switzerland. He later discovered that the EEC had told Hoffmann-La Roche that he had been the source of the price-fixing report. The company was fined pounds 150,000 and Mr Adams received a 12-month suspended sentence in absentia in Switzerland.

He fled to Britain in 1981 with his three daughters. In 1986 he accepted pounds 200,000 compensation from the European Community. Several years after arriving in Britain he married his second wife, who he is now accused of trying to have murdered.

(Photograph omitted)