Purdue Pharma L.P.: owners, OxyContin cases and bankruptcy

analysisThe dossier keeps corporate and family liability apart throughout: the 2007 felony plea was entered by The Purdue Frederick Company, with separate misdemeanour pleas by three of its executives, the 2020 plea by Purdue Pharma L.P. alone, the 2020 civil settlement by four family members and the estate of Jonathan Sackler without admission, and the 2025 settlement obligations by the Sackler-side payment parties. It traces the ownership chain from the trusts to the partnership, the family's board seats and officer roles, the distributions the courts and parties have described, the state lawsuits and the bankruptcy through the Supreme Court to the plan that took effect on 1 May 2026, with each allegation kept beside the response and outcome found in the record. ^{1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31}

analysisPurdue Pharma L.P. was formed as a Delaware limited partnership on 12 June 1991, according to the debtors' 2025 Disclosure Statement, and was treated from then on as a pass-through entity whose taxable income was reportable by its owners. Its own Chapter 11 petition of 15 September 2019 gives its employer identification number as 06-1307484, its principal place of business as One Stamford Forum, 201 Tresser Boulevard, Stamford, Connecticut, and its industry code as NAICS 3254. Its general partner was Purdue Pharma Inc. (PPI), a New York corporation whose secretary, Marc L. Kesselman, certified that PPI's board had approved the resolutions authorising the filing. ^{1 2}

analysisTwo registry entries do not match the court filings. The partnership's Florida qualification papers of 2003, as read by optical character recognition from a poor-quality scan that has not been checked against the image, give a formation date of 14 June 1999, and its Florida registry record shows employer identification number 06-1307486, the number of its general partner. The petition filed by the partnership itself is the primary statement of its own number, and the debtors' own lists in the first-day papers, the 2025 Disclosure Statement and the Confirmation Order consistently give 7484 to the partnership and 7486 to the general partner, while the Disclosure Statement gives 12 June 1991 as the formation date; no available record explains the Florida entries. Florida lists both Purdue Pharma L.P. (document B03000000381) and Purdue Pharma Inc. (F03000005558) as registered there from 6 November 2003, with Purdue Pharma Inc. named as the only general partner and Stuart D. Baker signing the 2003 papers as its executive vice president. In records retrieved in October 2026 both are inactive, after a notice of cancellation by the partnership and a withdrawal by the corporation, each filed on 1 October 2026. ^{3 1 4 5 2 6 7}

analysisIn bankruptcy Purdue Pharma L.P.'s case, No. 19-23649 in the Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York, was the lead case of 24 jointly administered debtors: Purdue Pharma Inc., partnerships and companies such as Purdue Pharma Manufacturing L.P., Imbrium Therapeutics L.P., Adlon Therapeutics L.P. and Avrio Health L.P., two British Virgin Islands entities, and Rhodes Associates L.P., Rhodes Pharmaceuticals L.P. and Rhodes Technologies. Avrio Health L.P. later appears in the court's lists as Purdue Products L.P.; Purdue Pharmaceutical Products L.P. remains a separate debtor there, although one passage of the 2025 Disclosure Statement calls it formerly Avrio Health L.P. A 2006 settlement agreement with the Endo companies, filed with the SEC, describes Purdue Pharma L.P. as successor in interest to The Purdue Pharma Company, a Delaware general partnership. An undated aggregator listing of Connecticut registry data adds an identifier for Purdue Pharma Inc. and an undated list of directors that has not been checked against the state record, although the 2020 federal settlement's tenure list and the Florida registry confirm several of the named directors. ^{7 8 9 5 1 10 11 12 6}

analysisThe business began as the Purdue Frederick Company, founded in 1892 by John Purdue Gray and George Frederick Bingham and sold in 1952 to the brothers Arthur, Mortimer and Raymond Sackler, as the District Court recounted in 2021. The same decision records that the Arthur Sackler family sold its interest to the other two branches before OxyContin was invented and has no involvement in the company or its bankruptcy. A general reference work adds that Arthur arranged the financing, that Mortimer and Raymond became co-chairmen and set up pharmaceutical companies in several other countries, and that Arthur's estate sold his one-third option to them after his death in 1987. No official record confirms these details: the court gives no date, price or option terms for the sale, and it records Mortimer and Raymond as co-chief executive officers without mentioning a co-chairmanship. The same reference work describes Raymond Sackler's wife Beverly and his sons Richard and Jonathan, whom the court records as members of Purdue's board, and calls Purdue privately owned by the two families. The official record is more specific: the District Court traced Purdue Pharma L.P.'s ownership through Pharmaceutical Research Associates L.P. to Beacon Company and Rosebay Medical Company L.P., owned by trusts for the families, and the debtors describe the separate independent associated companies as owned equally by the two sides. ^{1 2 3 4 5}

analysisUntil 30 September 2004 The Purdue Pharma Company, a Delaware general partnership owned by The Purdue Frederick Company and Purdue Pharma L.P., was also used to conduct pharmaceutical business, and from about January 1996 it recorded OxyContin sales, according to an Internal Revenue Service agent's declaration attached to the 2007 plea agreement. After that partnership was terminated, OxyContin sales were recorded by Purdue Pharma L.P., and The Purdue Frederick Company became one of its owners; the declaration does not give the size or duration of that interest. ⁶

analysisAt the 2019 petition date Purdue Pharma L.P. was wholly owned by Pharmaceutical Research Associates L.P. (formerly Purdue Holdings L.P.). About 99.5% of that partnership was held, through PLP Associates Holdings L.P. and BR Holdings Associates L.P., in equal halves by Beacon Company, the partnership of the Mortimer D. Sackler family (Side A), and Rosebay Medical Company L.P., that of the Raymond Sackler family (Side B), both owned by trusts for the families. The District Court found that from about 1993 until 2018 at least six or seven family members sat on the board of Purdue Pharma Inc., which managed the partnership, and that independent directors never equalled or outnumbered them; the last family director left in January 2019. The ownership and board pages set out each link and term. ^{1 2 3 4}

analysisIn their 2025 Disclosure Statement the debtors described two business segments: branded prescription medicines, opioid and non-opioid, carried on mainly by Purdue Pharma L.P. and its subsidiaries, and generic medicines developed and distributed by the Rhodes companies. The District Court stated that Purdue generated about $34 billion of revenue between 1996 and 2019, most of it from OxyContin, which accounted for some 91% of its U.S. revenue before the bankruptcy. ^{1 2 3}

analysisTwo federal criminal cases ended in guilty pleas by Purdue companies. In May 2007 The Purdue Frederick Company, Inc. pleaded guilty in Abingdon, Virginia to one felony count of misbranding OxyContin with intent to defraud or mislead; Purdue Pharma L.P. was a party to the civil settlement and was included with Purdue Frederick as a paying party under the plea agreement, but did not plead guilty, while three of Purdue Frederick's executives pleaded guilty individually, as corporate officers, to a misdemeanour count of misbranding. In November 2020 Purdue Pharma L.P., the only defendant in the New Jersey case, pleaded guilty to a conspiracy to defraud the United States and violate the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act and to two conspiracies to violate the federal Anti-Kickback Statute; on 28 April 2026 it was sentenced to a $3.544 billion fine and $2 billion forfeiture, against which the Justice Department will credit up to $1.775 billion for value conferred on state, local and tribal governments through the bankruptcy, on condition that Purdue cease to operate in its current form and emerge as a public benefit company or similar entity. ^{1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8}

analysisNo member of the Sackler family was charged in the 2020 case. Richard, David, Mortimer D.A. and Kathe Sackler and the estate of Jonathan Sackler separately agreed in October 2020 to pay the United States $225 million plus interest to settle civil claims; the agreement states that it is not an admission of liability, they expressly denied the allegations and any criminal liability was reserved. As of June 2024, Justice Kavanaugh's dissent in the Supreme Court noted, no federal or state criminal charges had been brought against any of the Sacklers individually. The consulting firm McKinsey & Company, for its own part, agreed in December 2024 to pay $650 million to resolve a federal criminal and civil investigation of its work for Purdue; the Justice Department's announcement describes the details in the charging documents and civil resolution as allegations. ^{9 7 10 11 12 13}

analysisThe District Court stated in 2021 that about $10.4 billion was distributed from the company to the Sacklers between 2008 and 2017, some $4.6 billion of it to pay pass-through taxes, and that more than half went into offshore companies or spendthrift trusts. By mid-2019 the attorneys general of 49 states had filed new or amended suits against Purdue, all naming members of the family or family entities. None of the suits of the states that later appealed the 2021 confirmation had reached judgment, and the only earlier judgment the court notes, in North Dakota's suit, favoured Purdue. The state suits were not covered by the automatic stay, but the Bankruptcy Court preliminarily enjoined litigation against Purdue and the Sacklers, the District Court affirmed that order in 2020, and by 2021 no activity had taken place in the suits since shortly after the filing. ¹

analysisPurdue Pharma L.P. and its affiliates filed for Chapter 11 on 15 September 2019; the family members and their entities did not. A first plan, built on a family contribution agreed at $4.275 billion over nine or ten years, was confirmed in 2021 with releases of the family from creditors' claims. The District Court vacated that confirmation in December 2021; the Second Circuit reversed in May 2023 and affirmed the plan as modified in March 2022; and on 27 June 2024 the Supreme Court held, five votes to four in Harrington v. Purdue Pharma L.P., that the Bankruptcy Code does not authorise releasing claims against non-debtors without the consent of the affected claimants. ^{2 3 4 5 1 6 7 8}

analysisThe renegotiated Eighteenth Amended plan was confirmed by Bankruptcy Judge Sean H. Lane on 18 November 2025 with the support of more than 99% of voting creditors. According to the debtors' July 2025 Disclosure Statement, the Sackler-side payment parties, not Purdue, are to pay up to approximately $7 billion over fifteen years under the shareholder settlements, the amount depending in part on how many creditors opt into the releases, which bind only creditors who choose to grant them; in its bench ruling confirming the plan the court described it as delivering some $6.5 to $7 billion in value from the debtors' former shareholders. The 2025 plan page compares these figures with the other totals given for the settlement. The plan took effect on 1 May 2026. Under it Knoa Pharma LLC received substantially all the debtors' non-cash assets and $135 million in cash, and that day the New York Attorney General announced that Purdue had ceased operations, that Knoa Pharma, owned by the nonprofit Knoa Foundation, was operating in its place, and that all members of the Sackler family are barred from selling opioids in the United States. ^{1 2 3 4 5}

analysisEnforcement of the settlement continued in the same court in 2026. On 8 October 2026 Judge Lane issued a written ruling memorialising his bench ruling of 21 August 2026, which granted in full a motion of the Side B trustees: Richard Sackler and Lin Gao had breached the Confirmation Order, the master settlement agreement and an earlier stipulation through filings the trustees called Interference Actions, and the court would award the Side B trustees and the Master Disbursement Trust their reasonable attorneys' fees and costs. Richard Sackler and Lin Gao had argued that the filings were permitted by a reservation of rights in the settlement agreement and concerned a dispute within the family's trusts. The available records show neither the amount awarded nor any appeal, nor the outcome of a hearing set for 28 October 2026 on their own motion to enforce the settlement. ^{6 2}