Pizgarlen

The PizGarLen corporation was founded by three ship captains. Ivan Pizano was the captain of the Trollop, a former FTL shipping CEO who had mismanaged his family’s company into the ground and lost all but the Trollop when a bigger company bought him out. Helmut Garson, captain of the Apropos, was a smuggler who had ran enough guns and drugs for the underworld without getting caught to buy his way out of his contract and his own ship. Ruben Lennart, captain of the Porteus, was, according to his personal ID, modified face, fingerprints and retina patterns, just an average, nondescript freighter captain of no remarkable origin (a comparison of his DNA against the interplanetary database would have revealed him to be Vichosy Pracknel, former federation bio-weapons technician still wanted for selling virus cultivations to terrorists).

Their company was formally incorporated on September 23’rd, 2323, billed as a small scale pharmaceutical company. They did not bother to petition the federation for the licences to sell medicine on the central planets.

In 2328, exploiting the terror of the galaxic plague and the prohibitively long delays of FTL communication, the three captains visited several colonies and used a fake license to convince each populace that they had a plague vaccine. Their prices for planetary doses were monumental but almost every colonial government paid.

The vaccines were actually the virus.

The ships dropped a jamming satellite into the orbits of each colony as they left to keep anyone from warning the central planets about the treachery and escaped with enough capital to fund their own colony. One year later their licences to sell medicine in the central planets would be rushed through the bureaucracy and they began selling over the counter remedies. Within one generation, thanks to timely applications of the right bribes to the right people, Pizgarlen was the sole military supplier of pharmaceuticals.

Today, most of the company’s income comes from the military’s insatiable demand for supplies, brisk sales of over the counter brand name medicine, and prescription medication. And they use part of this money to buy advertising time on every major media outlet, thus compelling news organizations to not report about the hormones in pork that made school children who ate the cafeteria’s ham sandwiches a larger risk of cancer, the tranquilizers that disproportionately gave people suicidal tendencies, the field combat stims that gave soldiers murderous impulses, and that their prescription medicines are sold at twenty five times what the company spent to develop them.

Oh, and anyone who had been willing to testify against the company has vanished.