Spanish doctor Vicente Soriano, who works at Madrid’s Carlos III Hospital, was found guilty by the city’s Supreme Court of Justice of conducting a clinical trial without the approval of Spain’s Agency for Medicines and Health Products.

They also found him liable for failing to obtain insurance for the medical trials and lying to patients when claiming he had been given the green light by the hospital to perform the tests.

Soriano, a world-leading investigator and author in the field of HIV and AIDS, lost all of his appeals except the one in which he claimed not to have withheld information from the hospital’s managers.

His unauthorized investigations looked to establish whether HIV patients with undetectable levels of the virus in their blood could be treated with raltegravir, a powerful new compound known to have fewer side effects.

Even after being found guilty, Soriano has continued to claim he carried out “observational studies” on an already commercialized product rather than a clinical test that requires authorization from official medical bodies, online medical newspaper Sciencemag.org reported on Thursday.