When the world's largest pharmaceutical company was found to have engaged in a massive illegal marketing campaign, federal prosecutors decided the company was too big to punish -- so they let it set up a shell corporation to take the blame.
Yet when the government threatened Pfizer with prosecution for off-label marketing fraud, it realized that a conviction would, under federal law, require that Pfizer be excluded from Medicare and Medicaid -- and that this would probably put the company out of business.