Martin Shkreli, the co-founder and former CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals (now Vyera Pharmaceuticals), has been barred from the pharmaceutical industry for the rest of his life. A federal judge ruled Friday that he will have to return $64.6 million in profits he and his former company reaped from jacking up the price and monopolizing the market for a lifesaving drug.
The ruling came weeks after a seven-day bench trial featured recordings of Shkreli ‘continuing to exert control over the company’, Vyera Pharmaceuticals LLC, from behind bars and discussing ways to thwart generic versions of its lucrative drug, Daraprim.
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“Shkreli was no side player in, or a ‘remote, unrelated’ beneficiary of Vyera’s scheme,” the judge wrote in a 135-page opinion.
“He was the mastermind of its illegal conduct and the person principally responsible for it throughout the years.”
Shkreli as the CEO raised the price of Daraprim from $13.50 to $750 per pill after obtaining exclusive rights to the decades-old drug in 2015. It treats a rare parasitic disease that strikes pregnant women, cancer patients and AIDS patients.
He resigned as Turing’s CEO in 2015, a day after he was arrested on securities fraud charges related to two failed hedge funds he ran before getting into the pharmaceutical industry. He was convicted of lying to investors and cheating them out of millions and is serving a seven-year sentence at a federal prison in Allenwood, Pennsylvania, and is due to be released in November.
Son of Albanian and Croatian immigrants, Martin Shkreli grew up in Brooklyn, New York. He received a degree in business from New York’s Baruch College in 2004.
After interning at the hedge fund founded by television personality Jim Cramer, Shkreli, in 2006, started his own venture – Elea Capital Management. The fund closed a year later after a $2.3m lawsuit from Lehman Brothers, which collapsed before it could collect on the ruling.
Shkreli then started MSMB Capital Management in 2008.
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In 2011, he founded biotech firm Retrophin. The goal was to focus on medicines for rare diseases. However, Shkreli was ousted from his position in 2014. He was accused of improperly handling legal settlements.
Retrophin then filed a $65m lawsuit that claimed Shkreli created the company and took it public to pay off investors in his old hedge fund, MSMB.
In 2017, he was found guiltu of three of eight counts in a criminal case brought by US prosecutors.
With inputs from the Associated Press
