After Merck & Co. officially announced its $41.1 billion merger with Schering-Plough yesterday, CEO Richard Clark made it clear his company is still looking to expand through further acquisitions and mergers.

According to the Wall Street Journal’s Health Blog:

Clark told us today that the newly combined company  is “actively looking” for biotechs to buy or partner with…“We’ve gone much more external,” he said. As Clark noted, the combined company will generate about $15 billion in free cash flow each year to go hunting.

He also told the Associated Press that Merck already has $8 billion in cash it plans to use for future deals. The Schering-Plough merger makes Merck the second biggest company in the industry, and the deal comes on the heels of industry leader Pfizer’s deal earlier this year to buy drugmaker Wyeth.

By purchasing Schering-Plough, Merck hopes to benefit from the company’s biotech, animal care and consumer products divisions. The move expands Merck’s worldwide operations to encompass 140 countries and will help to soften the blow when Merck loses its patent on Singulair, the allergy drug that produces over $4 billion a year for the company.

Clark didn’t put forward information on layoffs expected to affect 16,000 employees, 15 percent of the companies’ combined workforce. Approximately 40 percent of Schering-Plough’s senior leaders will join the combined company, according to Merck’s press release, while Schering-Plough CEO Fred Hassan is leaving with a severance package reportedly worth $51 million.

An FDA director has come under fire by a generics firm claiming that the director of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research favored a competitor in a wanton act of conflict of interest. The Wall Street Journal this morning broke the story that Janet Woodcock is under investigation by FDA officials, and that an official ethics complaint has been filed against the director.

The generic firm leading the charge, Amphastar, submitted an application in 2003 for approval of a generic version of the blood-thinner Levenox. In 2007, FDA rejected the drug due to potential immunogenicity concerns.  After sifting through public records, Amphastar discovered a conflict of interest between Woodcock and Momenta Pharmaceuticals—a rival firm that filed for a similar blood thinner two years after Levenox.

“It appeared [that] one of the founders of Momenta and the vice president of Sandoz, in February of 2007, were working together to define the immunogenicity standards at MIT,” Amphastar spokesperson Dan Dichner told Pharm Exec. “They sent these emails to Janet Woodcock urging FDA not to approve a generic equivalent hastily.”

Additionally, Amphastar claims that during the heparin crisis Woodcock turned to Momenta to identify the contaminant instead of using its own internal labs. Both companies’ blood thinners include Heparin, but neither firm was found to have the tainted heparin in its drugs.

The clincher was that Woodcock penned journal articles for two publications in tandem with Momenta scientists, which, according to Amphastar, caused Momenta’s stock to spike 17 percent.

“We just summarized public information, and asked Woodcock to recuse herself from the review process based on this information,” Dichner said. “The ball’s in [FDA’s] court. We’ve done everything they’ve asked. We’ve been inspected 12 times in the last year, which is unbelievable. The correspondence with the new leadership has been positive. They claim that they don’t encourage these types of industry relationships, and we hope that that’s true.”

FDA did not respond to comment by deadline.

“Pen-ance: Bristol-Myers Exec Gets Two Years of Hard Writing,” The Wall Street Journal Law Blog titled its piece.

“Call him the homework judge, not the hanging judge,” reads The New York Times’ lede. The paper goes on to note that “this is not the first time Judge Urbina has demanded written penance” in white-collar crime cases.

The jokiness is apt. The BMS-Apotex case set a comically new record for deception and incompetence ever for Big Pharma—making then–BMS CEO Peter Dolan, whose plush Park Avenue office was turned upside down during a very public FBI visit, a poster boy for industry bad behavior. The case itself was settled in 2007, with BMS pleading guilty to two counts of making false statements to the antitrust probers and paying the maximum fine, $1 million.

Yet Bodnar, Dolan’s hand-picked negotiator in the secret deal it had cut—and then bungled big time—with Apotex to delay knockoffs of the megabluckbuster bloodthinner, remained a loose end. Flash-forward to yesterday, when Urbina, tied him up quite nicely, sentencing Bodnar, who had pleaded guilty to a single count of making a false statement, to pay a $5,000 fine, serve two years’ probation—and produce a book about his descent into crime.

“I would like to see you write a book” so other people “don’t find themselves in a similar situation,” Urbina told Bodnar. “Who knows, it may even be inspirational.”

For all the humor, however, the judge may not be entirely joking. After all, the presumption that lessons can be learned by pharma’s new generation of leaders from an honest accounting of the BMS-Apotex misadventure isn’t as quirky as it may seem. (For a memory-refresher on the truly bizarre twists and turns, BNET Pharma’s Jim Edwards can’t be beat.)

Of course, whether Bodnar is up to the task is another question. His attorney was reported by Bloomberg as saying that Bodnar “is ‘gratified’ that the matter has been put behind him.”

Peter Dolan, who got tossed from BMS with a $10 million golden parachute, is probably hoping that’s exactly where the matter stays.