Pharmaceutical entrepreneur Martin Shkreli – who hiked the price of a life-saving drug by 5,000% – has been arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Advertisement
You may remember the 32-year-old founder and businessman from his viral story several months ago.
Martin was arrested for securities fraud, and is not related to his insane drug practices from months ago, but rather from when he was a former hedge fund manager and running another company called Retrophin.
“Shkreli was the paradigm faithless servant”, Retrophin’s complaint read (via the New York Times). “Starting sometime in early 2012, and continuing until he left the company, Shkreli used his control over Retrophin to enrich himself and to pay off claims of MSMB investors (who he had defrauded)”.
Shkreli said the company would cut the price of Daraprim. Lawyers for Retrophin and Shkreli did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
At least two separate Congressional probes have been launched since September on the pricing issues of Daraprim, which had always been available as a generic drug used to treat toxoplasmosis in AIDS patients. Instead, the company is reducing what it charges hospitals for Daraprim by as much as 50%.
Shkreli has said that insurance and other programs allow patients to get the drug despite the cost and that the profits are helping fund research into new treatments.
His feed is full of tweets where he defends his actions, boasts about his stock picking prowess (shares of another small biotech called KaloBios surged after he recently took it over) and attacks on his detractors – most notably Clinton and Bernie Sanders. “And my investors expect me to maximize profits, not to minimize them or go half or go 70 percent but to go to 100 percent of the profit curve”.
He stayed in the news this month when he bought the only copy of Wu-Tang Clan’s new album, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, and said his decision was prompted by “the opportunity to rub shoulders with celebrities and rappers who would want to hear it”. He said he paid $2 million.
Capers, the chief federal prosecutor, sidestepped a question about whether authorities had seized Shkreli’s album, and said: “We’re not aware of how he raised the funds to buy the Wu-Tang album”.
Retrophin has since sued Shkreli in federal court, seeking $65 million from him, accusing him of misusing the company’s cash and stock.
Advertisement
Last month, Shkreli was named chairman and CEO of KaloBios Pharmaceuticals after buying a majority stake in the struggling cancer drug developer. But they plunged 50% in premarket trading Thursday after reports of his arrest.
