(BRUSSELS) - EU competition regulators have raided pharmaceutical companies in a number of European nations on suspicion that they broke the bloc's anti-trust laws, the European Commission said Tuesday.

"On November 24, commission officials started inspections in several member states at the premises of a number of pharmaceutical companies," a statement said, without naming the companies or the countries where the raids took place.

Several of the sector's major players, France's Sanofi-Aventis, Swiss Novartis, Germany's Bayer and Merck and Britain's GlaxoSmithKline, said they were not targeted.

The commission, the EU's executive arm and top competition regulator, said it suspected that rules "prohibiting restrictive business practices and/or the abuse of a dominant market position may have been infringed."

Brussels underscored that the raids did not imply that the firms were guilty of any wrong-doing nor would they pre-judge the outcome of any investigations.

Each European citizen spends an average of 400 euros per year on medication, amounting to a massive 200-billion-euro market that has attracted much attention in Brussels.

Last January the commission launched an antitrust probe into the entire pharmaceutical industry amid concerns about uncompetitive behaviour in the sector.

That original probe led to raids on several laboratories belonging to Sanofi-Aventis, Sandoz (a Novartis affiliate), GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca among others.

A commission spokesman said that the latest operation was not directly linked to the broader investigation, the preliminary results of which are due to be published this week.

"However we learned things during the sector enquiry that we thought were worth looking at more closely in the context of this specific anti-trust case," the spokesman said.

Concerned about a dwindling flow of new drugs and delays to generic products coming to the market, the Commission's larger probe aims to determine if patent settlements between firms break EU competition rules.

EU regulators have also been looking into whether drug companies illegally thwart the entry of rivals into their markets with artificial barriers such as misuse of patent rights or litigation.

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