The medicines are not new innovative products developed by pharmaceutical companies after enormous investment in research and development.
Instead, they are unbranded so-called ‘generic’ drugs which have been available for many years and include commonly used antibiotics prescribed to millions of patients.
He added: ‘What is amazing is that this seems to have happened under the noses of hundreds of highly paid bureaucrats whose job should be to keep an eye on this sort of thing and stamp it out.
‘If you were running a business and one of your suppliers said they were putting their prices up by 1,000 per cent, you would want to know why – but when this happens in our Health Service it appears nobody blinks.