Documents from Valeant and Turing show they have made a practice of buying and then dramatically raising prices for low-cost drugs given to patients with life-threatening conditions such as heart disease, AIDS and cancer.
Advertisement
Former Turing Pharmaceuticals CEO Martin Shkreli leaves court in New York, Wednesday, Feb. 3, 2016.
When Shkreli headed the pharmaceutical company, he raised the price of the drug to $13.50 a pill to $750 a pill, a 5,000% increase.
“Should be a very handsome investment for all of us”, he said. “Let’s all cross our fingers that the estimates are accurate”, Shkreli wrote to an outside contact in August. Mr. Shkreli faces seven counts of securities fraud and conspiracy, while Mr. Greebel faces a wire fraud conspiracy charge. Shkreli, who resigned from Turing after coming under investigation for securities fraud, is expected to invoke his Fifth Amendment right not to testify at Thursday’s hearing.
He has hired a new lawyer, Benjamin Brafman, replacing the lawyers at Arnold & Porter, a major Washington firm. It was postponed so Shkreli could find a new defense lawyers, having fired his last counsel. Clients have included Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former managing director of the International Monetary Fund; the hip-hop mogul Sean Combs, known variously as Puff Daddy, Diddy, and P. Diddy; and the late pop star Michael Jackson.
Committee Democrats had requested documents from Turing and Valeant ahead of a hearing Thursday, and summarized the more than 300,000 pages they received, including e-mails, corporate projections and analysis on revenues and profits.
A Turing spokeswoman sent us a statement saying the drug maker does, indeed, invest its net profits in R&D; the wholesale list price for Daraprim is not what many customers, notably hospitals, actually pay, since 50 percent discounts are offered; and patients can access an assistance program.
As early as last May, Turing planned to turn Daraprim into a $200-million-a-year drug by dramatically increasing its price, according to documents obtained by the committee.
“I know you are smiling, but I am very serious, sir”, Cummings said.
“We are confident that he will be fully exonerated”, Brafman said in a statement. Shkreli, who has become the poster child of pharmaceutical-industry greed after hiking the price of an anti-infection drug by…
However, some of the documents released show that some patients had to deal with co-payments as high as $16,800 and Turing was receiving protest from doctors.
Less than three weeks later, on October 8, another consultant urged Turing’s board to remove Shkreli as chief executive and take concrete steps to lower the price.
He also whipped up cyber-rage after purchasing the lone copy of a Wu-Tang Clan album for $2 million and then casually noting that he never even listened to it.
Regarding Valeant, the Democratic staff memo says the company identified revenue goals for Isuprel and Nitropress and raised the prices to reach those goals.
Advertisement
The closed distribution of the drug also means that generic companies can not get access to samples for generic versions of Daraprim. The same presentation noted that 2014 revenues for Isuprel and Nitropress were $54.5 million and $98.7 million, respectively.
