Healthcare firms asked to take Greek debt writedown By Andreas Krner and Ben Hirschler FRANKFURT/LONDON (Reuters) - International healthcare firms have been asked to accept losses on Greek government bonds they got in exchange for unpaid hospital bills, evidence that the country's debt restructuring deal will have an impact beyond the mainstream financial sector. German healthcare firm Fresenius and French drugmaker Sanofi both said on Tuesday they held Greek government debt affected by the move. Greece is in the process of finalizing a deal known as private sector involvement (PSI) that will see bond holders swallow a 53.5 percent nominal loss on the money they lent Athens. They have until Thursday night to sign up to the deal, but Greece has said it is prepared to legally force creditors to participate if they do not do so willingly. A spokesman for Fresenius, which like many other health firms was forced to take Greek bonds as payment for unpaid Greek hospital bills, told Reuters the company would look into Greece's request. "We don't expect a significant impact on our results," the spokesman said. He added that most of the bonds, which had a face value of roughly 50 million euros ($66 million), had already been sold or written down. Sanofi said it also still held some Greek bonds, which a spokeswoman confirmed were eligible for the PSI scheme. The company said it had received an official invitation from the Greek government to participate in the PSI arrangement. Drug companies and other healthcare providers have been caught in the firing line of the euro zone crisis because of their reliance on governments for business. In the case of Greece, this has involved some of the most draconian price cuts for medicines of any European country. In late 2010 Athens also announced it would issue government bonds to companies supplying state-run hospitals for unpaid debts dating back to 2007-09. A number of drugmakers still hold those Greek bonds. Another company with some of the debt on its books is AstraZeneca, although a company spokeswoman said on Tuesday the amount was "not material," adding the Anglo-Swedish group was considering its position over this debt. Other pharmaceutical firms, including Roche, have now sold all their Greek bond holdings. The European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations estimates that across the region the total outstanding debt for medicines is between 12 billion and 15 billion euros ($16-20 billion). Nearly all of those unpaid bills are in the four countries - Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy - at the heart of the crisis. Spain is the biggest single debtor, with the country's national health system owing pharmaceutical companies 6.37 billion euros at the end of December, up 36 percent on a year earlier, according to the Spanish industry group Farmaindustria. GlaxoSmithKline CEO Andrew Witty warned last month that Europe was "stuck in a bad place" compared with the United States and Japan, where his company now plans to focus its drug development efforts. $1 = 0.7557 euros Writing by Ludwig Burger; Editing by Hans-Juergen Peters and Will Waterman