That leaves the European Parliament where MEP Bashir Khanbhai is raising questions. He wrote to Jean-Pierre Garnier, chief executive of GSK, some three months ago and says he has yet to receive a written response. He sees parallel importers as parasites making hundreds of millions of euros from European taxpayers.

He thinks the answer is for European governments to work together to create a reimbursement system where the price for any given drug would be the same everywhere in Europe, with the individual governments giving different levels of reimbursements, according to the price that they wish to charge.

Our Analysis: The conundrum is that drugs prices in Europe are fixed by the different national governments, and yet single market legislation gives parallel importers an open charter to arbitrage. Imposing warehouse-by-warehouse restrictions sounds draconian, but it is one way to limit parallel imports.

On balance, some sort of legal response looks likely from the big distributors. But it is interesting to note just how muted their response has been to the GSK measures, introduced 6 months ago!

Meanwhile, the political will to act seems to be lacking. It is hard to see national governments ever giving up their powers to levy the prices they think fit. But equally it is hard to see the EU being willing to put in place formal curbs on the single market.