Martin Shkreli, a pharmaceutical con artist, was taken into custody this past week with a 5 million dollar bond. Though Shkreli is known for price gouging vital drugs, he is being charged for repeatedly losing money for investors and lying to them about it, illegally taking assets from one of his companies to pay off debtors in another.
“Shkreli essentially ran his company like a Ponzi scheme where he used each subsequent company to pay off defrauded investors from the prior company,” said Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Robert Capers, at a press conference.
The 32 year old has become infamous within the pharmaceutical drug industry for raising prices more than 55 times for Daraprim in September. Prices went from $13.50 per pill to $750. This drug is the primary treatment for a parasitic condition, more commonly known as toxoplasmosis, which can be deadly for unborn babies and patients with compromised immune systems including those with HIV or cancer. Turing Pharmaceuticals AG, Shkreli's company, bought the drug, moved it to a closed distribution system and began making the cost skyrocket.
When he first started getting criticism for the price gouge, he said he would lower the prices. Then he retracted his statements. Hillary Clinton tried interfering last month to get him to cut the cost, but he responded to her with a tweet reading “lol.”
This month at a Forbes summit in New York, Shkreli was casual wearing a hooded sweatshirt where he said if he could have done it over, “I probably would have raised the price higher,” and going on to say, “My investors expect me to maximize profits.”
Before 23 years old, Shkreli was managing hedge fund Elea Capital in New York and lost everything in 2007. Later, in 2010, he lost his clients' $3 million investment in MSMB Capital, his newer fund.
Shkreli's infamous business decisions only furthered when he bet shares of Orexigen Therapeutics Inc. in 2011, where it fell and ended up owing $7 million to his Merrill Lynch, his broker, according to authorities. Shkreli wasn't able to pay his debt extinguished it with a $1.35 million settlement.
Shkreli has many more accusations being thrown at him, with involvement in many other scandals. Let's hope the story of Martin Shkreli has a happy ending and those who he's been benefitting from get justice.