France: A French appeal court on Monday upheld a four-year prison sentence for the founder of PIP, the company that manufactured defective breast implants that caused a health scare across Europe and South America.
The court in the southern city of Aix-en-Provence confirmed the fraud conviction against Poly Implant Prothese (PIP) founder Jean-Claude Mas, 76.
The court also upheld the 2013 trial's sentence that Mas must pay 75,000 euros ($86,000) and be banned for life from working in medical services or running a company.
Mas also faces two other pending legal cases, one for involuntary manslaughter and another linked to the financial implications of the scandal.
The scandal first emerged in 2010 after doctors noticed abnormally high rupture rates in women with PIP implants.
It gathered steam worldwide in 2011, with some 300,000 women in 65 countries believed to have received the faulty implants.
In France alone, 18,000 women had PIP implants removed because of a risk of rupture or because they had become uncomfortable.
In the appeal, which had to be held in a congress centre to accommodate all the plaintiffs, Mas denied that the implants made by his company from industrial oil carried any health risk.
