After 66 child deaths, a clean chit, and a ‘vanishing act’: Maiden Pharma is coming back, rebranded

This is the second part of an investigative series examining pharmaceutical companies linked to the deaths of children from contaminated medicines, and the regulatory failures that allowed them to keep operating. It is supported by the Thakur Foundation. The foundation has not exercised any editorial control over the project.

The registered address of CureClip Pharmaceuticals is on the 12th floor of a corporate building in New Delhi’s Netaji Subhash Place. But there is no board outside the door, no GST certificate, nothing to announce the company’s presence. The signage instead belongs to Kikass Cosmetics LLP, a nascent cosmetics brand founded in 2024. Staff deny any knowledge of a second company at the address. 

Shared registered addresses are not unusual in India. But what stands out here is the history. CureClip’s previous name – Maiden Pharmaceuticals – was prominently displayed at the same door until a few years ago. The change came in the shadow of a tragedy: the deaths of at least 66 children in The Gambia linked to its cough syrups. 

The company had quietly rebranded as CureClip Pharmaceuticals in February 2025. It has not responded to summons issued by a Gambian High Court, including one served via a newspaper advertisement in India after all other attempts to reach Maiden failed, according to Gambian lawyers. A civil suit filed by 19 victim families appears to be proceeding without the company’s participation. 

Newslaundry and The News Minute investigated how a company at the centre of one of the worst pharmaceutical disasters in recent memory has managed to evade accountability, and now seems poised to re-enter the market. We reviewed financial statements and GST filings, visited its Haryana unit, and spoke to company staff, state drug authorities, and industry experts. We also spoke to lawyers in The Gambia to understand their claims about how the company has managed to dodge accountability.

‘The Gambian case? It’s closed’

Six rooms across two buildings in Netaji Subhash Place now house the offices of at least eight companies linked to current and previous directors of the company formerly known as Maiden. Five are in the medical or pharmaceutical sector: CureClip Pharmaceuticals, VMK Pharmatech, MG Lifecare LLP, Intact Drugs and Pharmaceuticals Private Limited, and Real Drugs Private Limited. Of these, only Intact was open and functioning at the time of our first visit on February 20. 

Walking into the Intact office, it is hard to ignore the photographs lining the wall. In them – taken at what appears to be a religious event – Naresh Kumar Goyal, a director of both Intact and CureClip, is pictured alongside prominent leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), including Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, Union minister Manohar Lal Khattar, former Union minister Harsh Vardhan, and Delhi MP Manoj Tiwari, among others. 

An employee at the Intact office dismissed our request for a meeting with the directors, saying, “The Gambia case? It’s closed.” 

It is not. A civil suit is currently before the Gambian High Court. 

Even an investigation into allegations that a senior drug inspector in Haryana accepted a large bribe to swap the samples tested in India appears to have stalled entirely. The Commissioner of the state’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) told us that he does not know what the investigation found. 

The Gambian tragedy: A timeline

In 2022, a surge in acute kidney injury (AKI) among Gambian children prompted an investigation, which found that the majority had consumed one of four cough syrups imported from Maiden Pharmaceuticals’ unit in Haryana’s Sonepat. 

But in 2023, then Union Health Minister Mansukh Mandaviya gave the company a clean chit after Indian laboratory tests found the disputed batch of drugs safe for consumption – a result that stood in direct contradiction to three independent tests in Ghana, France, and Switzerland, all of which detected toxic levels of an illegal solvent. The World Health Organization (WHO) had itself issued a drug alert against the four cough syrups in October 2022.

In July 2022, a causality assessment carried out by Gambian authorities had noted, “The Epidemiology and Disease Control (EDC) Unit of the Gambia identified a cohort of 82 children with AKI during the June to October 2022 outbreak.” 

Investigations found two toxic solvents – diethylene glycol (DEG) and ethylene glycol (EG) – instead of pharma-grade propylene glycol (PG) in the four cough syrups the children consumed. These syrups were Promethazine oral solution, Kofexmaline Baby Cough Syrup, Makoff Baby Cough Syrup, and MaGrip n Cold Syrup. 

According to the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation (CDSCO), the drugs were all from a single batch produced in the Sonepat unit in December 2021, and were to expire in November 2024. They reached the Gambian market in June 2022 through a locally registered distributor, Atlantic Pharmaceuticals Company Limited.

On October 5 that year, the WHO issued a medical product alert against the “substandard (contaminated) paediatric drugs,” linking Maiden’s cough syrups to the child deaths. The news drew global attention, prompting Haryana drug authorities to hold a joint inspection of the company’s manufacturing unit with the CDSCO. 

The inspection found that Maiden had failed to conduct crucial testing of raw materials before production: “The firm has not performed the quality testing of propylene glycol for diethylene glycol and ethylene glycol.” On October 11, all production at the Maiden factory was halted. 

Based on the CDSCO findings, the Department of Health and Family Welfare set up a committee to probe the matter. Meanwhile in The Gambia, an inquiry by the National Assembly’s Select Committee on Health, Disaster, Refugees and Humanitarian Relief stated in their report in December 2022 that the company should be held culpable for the deaths. “The Select Committee is convinced that Maiden Pharmaceuticals Ltd. is culpable and should be held accountable for exporting the contaminated medicines that was linked to the death of at least 70 children in The Gambia 2022,” it said.

Another causality assessment report was submitted on December 9 by a committee of medical experts  from within the country and outside as well as a WHO consultant. This too certified that “the outbreak of AKI in children in the Gambia is attributable to medicines contaminated with DEG/EG”.

Then, on June 27, 2023, under the initiative of the Gambia Bar Association, the families of 19 children filed a civil suit claiming damages amounting to 5 million Gambian Dalasis (around Rs 62.5 lakh) per child. The suit was against Maiden Pharmaceuticals, Atlantic Pharmaceuticals (distributor), the country’s Medicine Control Agency (MCA), Ministry of Health, and Attorney General. 

Asked why only 19 families joined the suit, the legal team said, “The others didn't think anything would come of it. These are poor people, they left it to god.” The case is ongoing. 

The Indian miracle

Following initial suspicions of DEG/EG poisoning, Gambian health authorities had sent samples of 38 cough syrups to United States Pharmacopeia Laboratory, Ghana; Centre Humanitaire Des Metiers De La Pharmacie, France; and Itertek (Schweitz) AG, Switzerland. Of the 38, only Maiden’s four were found to contain toxic levels of DEG/EG.

Yet when the same samples were tested in the Regional Drugs Testing Laboratory (RDTL), Chandigarh, they were found to be safe for consumption, with no detectable DEG or EG. 

On December 13, then Drugs Controller General of India VG Somani wrote to the WHO with the Chandigarh results. That was sufficient for the Indian government, which moved to dismiss any causal link between Maiden’s syrups and the deaths.

In March 2023, the then Union Minister of State for Chemicals and Fertilizers Bhagwanth Khuba told Parliament that the WHO’s information was “inadequate”, and dismissed the WHO’s finding of deaths caused by AKI “secondary to E coli infection compounded by medication associated poisoning” as a “working hypothesis”.

Then, in July 2023, Union Health Minister Mansukh Mandaviya took it a step further on an ANI podcast. “When we looked into it in depth…we found that the children had diarrhea. Why did you give cough syrups to children with diarrhea?” The Gambia had witnessed an outbreak of diarrhea following massive floods on July 30 and 31, 2022. But it is worth noting that the country first reported a surge in AKI four days prior to the floods, on July 26. 

Moreover, the Gambian National Assembly Select Committee’s inquiry report quoted Dr Abubacarr Jagne, a consultant nephrologist, as stating, “E coli causes AKI and even some viral AKI especially in the rainy season, but the number of cases and case fatality rate could never be explained by what we saw within this crisis.”

Mansukh Mandaviya made another claim unchallenged in the interview. He said, “The Gambia told us that they tested 23 samples, of which four failed. All the medicines exported to the country were from the same batch. If they were contaminated, all samples would have failed, but only four did.” What the minister failed to understand, or ignored, was the fact that the 23 samples were each of a different medicine, not 23 samples from a single product.

He also suggested the furore over the cough syrups was a move to damage India’s image, as drugs from “developed countries” also routinely fail compliance tests. This framing echoed a statement given by Maiden director Naresh Kumar Goyal to The Tribune on October 9, 2022. He had said, “We are manufacturing lakhs of drugs every year and samples of 1 or 2 percent drugs may fail laboratory parameters sometimes, and it is a routine process as samples of even multi-national companies fail.”

A bribery allegation and an untraceable lawyer

Even as Maiden cited the results from the Chandigarh lab to seek the reopening of its manufacturing units, a young Haryana lawyer named Yashpal wrote an explosive letter to the state’s chief secretary in April 2023, alleging that the company had bribed an official to switch the samples that were tested in India.

Yashpal accused Maiden of paying Rs 5 crore in bribe to the then state drug controller Manmohan Taneja. “[Manmohan Taneja] got the control samples of all these cough syrups prepared afresh and changed before the sampling was done, by mixing glycerol and propylene glycol as solvent,” read the letter in Hindi.

Eight months later, in December 2023, then joint commissioner of the Haryana FDA Gagandeep Singh told Reuters, “I've been given the direction by the government to have an exhaustive analysis of the whole complaint and give a consolidated report. It’s in the final stages, pretty soon it will be completed.”

Then, silence. 

In February this year, we visited Panchkula and Panipat in Haryana in an effort to trace Yashpal and seek an official update on the status of the probe into the bribery allegation. Beyond his initial comments to Reuters, Yashpal has not been quoted in any major news report.

At the Panipat address listed in his letter, a junior lawyer told us that Yashpal visits the office only a handful of times a year, and he has seen him only once or twice. A senior lawyer at the same address, reached by phone, denied any knowledge of such a person at all – contradicting the junior lawyer. The Bar Associations in Panipat and Rohtak, said to be Yashpal’s hometown, could offer no information either.

We then proceeded to the FDA office in Panchkula, where we met the current State Drug Controller (SDC) Lalit Kumar Goel. “Those were made-up stories,” he said about the allegations against his predecessor Manmohan Taneja. He added that he did not know the status of the probe. “It may be going on at a higher level, we don’t know,” he said. “He is a retired officer now, it would be disrespectful to talk about that now.”

A similar response came from FDA Commissioner Manoj Kumar, who said that he assumed office recently and that details of the probe are only available with the “government”.

Red flags ignored

One argument consistently advanced by Indian authorities seeking to minimise the tragedy was that the four syrups were produced solely for export and were never sold in India. Dr YK Gupta of the Standing National Committee on Medicines told ANI, “The public in India must be made aware that the licence for this drug was for export only. Cough syrups sold in India don’t have this possibility.”

But as whistleblower and writer Dinesh Thakur pointed out, various other drugs produced by Maiden, including cough syrups under different names, were being sold in India. In fact, not only were Maiden’s products being sold domestically, they were also bought by the Haryana government for distribution in its hospitals and health centres.

The Gambian tragedy was not the first time the CDSCO was alerted to violations by Maiden. Almost a decade before the child deaths, the same company had been blacklisted by Vietnam in 2013 due to quality violations in the drug Omeprazole 20 mg (Omepro). An inspection of the Sonepat facility in 2014 found 61,000 substandard Ranitidine tablets. 

In February 2023, months after the company made global news, a Sonepat court sentenced Maiden’s Naresh Kumar Goyal and MK Sharma to two and a half years in prison in connection with that case. As section 389 of the Criminal Procedure Code (CRPC) allows for sentences below three years to be suspended pending appeal, the men were never jailed. NL-TNM was unable to ascertain details of the convicts’ appeal in the case.

Closer home, in 2011, Bihar had blacklisted Maiden after its Methylergometrine and Erythromycin syrup tested not of standard quality (NSQ).

In 2020 and 2021, Kerala found five drugs from the Sonepat factory were NSQ. Gujarat too found one drug manufactured by Maiden’s Himachal Pradesh factory that failed in a quality test. Both states flagged it in the extended Licensing, Laboratory and Legal Node (XLN) database maintained by the Government of India.

Even drugs Maiden supplied to the Haryana Medical Services Corporation Limited (HMSCL) did not meet standards, according to a February 2024 order issued by HMSCL’s former managing director Vivek Aggarwal IRS. Three of four drugs received under rate contracts with Maiden – Albendazole 400 mg, Ibuprofen IP 400 mg, and Azithromycin Suspension 40mg/ml – tested NSQ in empanelled laboratories. 

The missing Goyals

Lawyers representing the victim families in the Gambian High Court faced an unexpected roadblock when trying to hand over the summons issued to Maiden. The company was simply unreachable, neither at the New Delhi address where it is registered, nor at the Haryana manufacturing unit, they said.

The legal team led by Loubna Farage, in August 2024, moved the court to authorise New Delhi-based advocate Sidharth Sijoria to serve Maiden the summons by publishing it in The Times of India, citing the paper’s wide circulation. Sidharth, who co-chairs the Young Commonwealth Lawyers Association, said the decision was taken after all efforts to reach Maiden failed. 

Maiden had stopped responding to emails and calls from Atlantic Pharmaceuticals soon after the deaths in 2022 itself, the Gambian distributor told the National Assembly Standing Committee. The case now appears to be proceeding ex-parte. By mid-February 2026, all plaintiffs had given evidence and been cross examined. The third defendant, the Gambian Medical Council Agency, too have been cross examined, according to the lawyers.

Even as the Gambian legal team claimed to have struggled to locate the company, other businesses owned by the same people carried on as usual. In fact, Maiden itself appears to have remained actively involved in other legal proceedings post the 2022 tragedy, as a Delhi High Court judgement from March 2023 shows. The order pertains to trademarks of three topical medications for the skin, contested by the UK-based Glaxo Group Limited, with further mediation efforts seemingly initiated in 2024.

Then, on February 17, 2025, the company rebranded themselves as CureClip Pharmaceuticals Limited, according to a certificate of incorporation issued by India’s Ministry of Corporate Affairs, accessed through the company information website Tofler. 

The company’s current directors are Vivek Goyal and his father Naresh Kumar Goyal. 

Vivek is also a director of Real Drugs Private Limited, DJ Biotech Private Limited, Shree Bhagwati Credit Portfolios Private Limited, Veu Greens LLP, and Kikass Cosmetics LLP. Five active companies have Naresh as director – DJ Biotech Private Limited, RX91 Web Private Limited, NDL Pythian Council, MG Lifecare LLP, and Intact Drugs and Pharmaceuticals Private Limited. 

Additional names in the network include Naresh’s third son Kapil Goyal, who is a director of both Real Drugs and Intact. There is also his second son Manish Goel, who is a director of RX91 Web Private Limited, MG LIfecare LLP, Metallurgy Research LLP, as well as two more pharmaceutical companies called ARK Health Care Private Limited and PRG Pharma Private Limited. Shikha Goyal is also a director of Kikass, and was a director of Veu Greens in the past. Anju Goyal serves as the director of Shree Bhagwati.

The overlapping names point to a network of companies connected by past and present directors of CureClip. A large share of these belong to the pharmaceutical and chemical sectors.

Our attempts to meet the directors and request them for their versions were unsuccessful. No one was available to meet us either at the office space shared by Kikass and CureClip or at the Intact office.

Sagar Kapoor, who introduced himself as an accountant working with Kikass, first claimed he was unaware of any entity called CureClip. He then said he didn’t know of the whereabouts of the Goyals and refused to share any phone number or email ID. When we returned a second time, a staff member locked the office door upon seeing us in the hallway. When we knocked, a person in the adjacent office told us that they could see us through the CCTV camera and chose not to open it. A security guard escorted us out.

At Intact’s office, our first visit was met with hostility. Pawan Nigam, who identified himself as an accountant, told us he could share contact details of the directors. During a second visit, we found that the signage advertising both Intact and Real Drugs had been removed and the doors were locked. Security personnel arrived as soon as we got to the office door. One of them said the office had been functioning as usual until the previous day.   

However, Manish Goel met this reporter at his office in Netaji Subhash Place on March 16. He claimed he had split from his father and brothers over differences in how the business was run. He said he was involved in “managing” the Gambian issue but denied all the allegations against the company. But he maintained that Maiden was made a “scapegoat to save a bigger organisation”.

At the Haryana State Industrial and Infrastructure Development Corporation (HSIIDC) estate in Kundli, Sonepat, we found the board that once said Maiden had been replaced with one that read CureClip in late February. It is not clear whether this unit is presently functioning. Manish Goel said that Maiden’s other unit in Himachal Pradesh had been shut.

The ‘non-existent’ company that files GST 

Maiden last exported drugs from India in 2022, as the data on its foreign trade shows. Its client countries included UAE, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Iraq, Nigeria, Venezuela, Turkey, Mozambique, Ghana, Lebanon, Turkmenistan, The Gambia, and Libya. The biggest buyer was Afghanistan, at 348 of the total 523 consignments Maiden shipped in 2022. The Gambia imported 29 consignments from Maiden that year. 

Maiden may have been untraceable to Gambian authorities and its own distributor since 2022, but the company has not once defaulted on its annual audits or tax filings. GST records show that the company has filed returns consistently ever since the tax regime was set up in 2017. 

In the two years before the Gambian tragedy, the company reported revenues of roughly Rs 38 crore and Rs 39.7 crore respectively. By 2022-23 – the year the deaths became global news and its Haryana factory was shut – revenue had slipped to around Rs 36.2 crore, suggesting it continued operating through much of that year. Then came the collapse: revenue fell to approximately Rs 4.35 crore in 2023-24, and to nil in 2024-25. The company has posted losses every year since 2021-22, with the accumulated loss crossing Rs 62 lakh in the most recent financial year.

The fixed assets tell a similar story. Property, plant, and equipment, which peaked at roughly Rs 6.4 crore in 2021-22, had shrunk to around Rs 1.7 crore by 2024-25.  

‘No one killed the Gambian children’

Accountability over the tragedy has been elusive not just from Maiden and the Indian government, but also the Gambian government, as court documents show. Asked why the victims chose to file a civil suit instead of initiating criminal proceedings, the legal team said, “It was up to the government to press criminal charges. No one knows why that wasn’t done.”

While Maiden was a no-show, Atlantic Pharmaceuticals’ directors Haidar Chouman and Sierra Leonean national Ali Shuman were arrested in the first week of October 2022. They were released after two days on the conditions that they would “regularly report to the police at its headquarters in Banjul, provide one Gambian surety, and the deposit of passports”. 

In court, Atlantic argued that they cannot be held liable for the tragedy as they complied with all regulatory requirements. As per the Select Committee’s inquiry report, the Gambian Medicine Control Agency (MCA) had “approved the import clearance permit for Atlantic Pharmacy which contained the suspected four syrups on June 17, 2022.” The MCA also said that the imported drugs were satisfactory upon arrival, as “all the products came with the required certificate of analysis from the manufacturer and all the certificates indicating that the products are of good quality and fit for use.” 

Atlantic further insisted that the cough syrups were not responsible for the child deaths, stating, “To my knowledge, diethylene glycol is a colourless and odourless liquid and is used as a sweetener and solvent in baby syrups.” This, however, is a blatant falsity: DEG is an industrial solvent not approved for pharmaceutical use; propylene glycol is the approved excipient.   

However, the MCA and the Gambian Health Ministry, the third and fourth defendants in the case, later submitted in court that “the death of the victim was a result of deliberate concealment and misrepresentation of documents by the exporter of the drugs in issue.” They denied liability, citing that the import permit was granted on the basis of “authentic documents allowed under the law”.

While the governments and businesses involved trade blame and legal arguments, the families of the children – some mere months old when they died – have entered the fourth year of awaiting justice. 

Meanwhile, other entities linked to the network of Maiden directors have been accused of other irregularities.

In the financial year 2024–25, Intact and Real Drugs faced search and seizure operations by the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) regarding the export of certain cough syrup solutions to Nigeria. The companies’ financial statements, accessed through Tofler, revealed that codeine (an opioid analgesic and cough suppressant) based cough syrups were manufactured by Intact and then sold to Real, which then exported the drugs to Nigeria – the country is battling codeine abuse and had banned its import in 2018. Real had made purchases worth Rs 13,47,449.87 from Intact that year.

‘Everything in order’: Drug Controller  

Haryana FDA Commissioner Manoj Kumar confirmed that Maiden’s license has been cancelled. No company by the name of CureClip is registered in the state, he added. 

Post the Gambian tragedy, regulatory reforms like Corrective and Preventive Action (CAPA), schedule M (GMP standards updated in 2023-24), and risk-based inspections have been mandated to ensure drug quality, Manoj Kumar added. 

State Drug Controller (SDC) Lalit Kumar Goel said that the number of drug inspectors in the state had increased from 10 to 32 two years ago. The 20 drug testing laboratories in the state are private-owned and government-approved, he added. He also said that there are only 121 allopathic drug manufacturing units in the state. (The list of manufacturing units available on the Haryana FDA website, however, names 202 units. The list does not clarify if it includes AYUSH companies.)

As for licensing of manufacturers exporting drugs, the state grants licenses only to those companies that have secured the CDSCO’s no objection certificate (NOC), he said. In 2024, following multiple reports of Indian generic drugs causing harm or fatality in several countries, the CDSCO had stipulated that the manufacturing of unapproved/banned/new drugs solely for export purposes should apply for an NOC.

When asked about steps taken to address cases of good manufacturing practices (GMP) violations in the aftermath of the Gambian tragedy, Lalit Kumar said, “We conduct inspections. Joint inspections [with the CDSCO] are also being done.” He also said that every batch of medicines produced in the state are tested, irrespective of whether they are to be sold domestically or exported. Action will be taken against those failing to comply, he said.

Regarding specific action taken to prevent DEG/EG contamination in cough syrups, Lalit Kumar said that all manufacturers have been advised to ensure facilities for gas chromatography (GC) testing in their units. In October 2025, following an amendment to Indian Pharmacopoeia 2022, “all liquid orals must be tested for DEG and EG impurities, irrespective of whether propylene glycol was added to the formulation.” 

A memo sent to all senior drug control officers in the state by Lalit Kumar said that this is a “mandatory requirement” and officers must ensure “strict compliance”. While the FDA recommends that manufacturers have an in-house GC instrument, the high costs – Rs 30–40 lakh – deters some companies from setting it up, he said. “Those companies should do the GC test from outside,” he added.

Coming up in Part 3: Indian pharma company linked to Uzbek child deaths