Summary: Controversial “Bad Boy” pharma executive Martin Shkreli was arrested on December 17th on fraud charges.
Martin Shkreli made news earlier this year as a symbol of disgusting pharmaceutical greed. He raised the price on an old drug used to treat AIDS patients and babies from $13.50 a pill to the exponentially larger $750 a pill. When attacked, Shkreli said that his only remorse was not raising the price more.
Finally, karma has seemed to get him back. Shkreli was arrested Thursday on fraud charges. His crimes allegedly date to his younger days, when he managed a hedge fund and ran his first biopharmaceutical company, Retrophin. According to the New York Times, his alleged crimes were a “quasi-Ponzi scheme, in which he used money from his company to pay off money-losing investors in his hedge funds.” An F.B.I. official described the case as a “securities fraud trifecta of lies, deceit and greed.”
The New York Times offers a video of him skyping with a teenager – and he seems just as awful as you might assume.
Shkreli also famously spent millions on the only copy of the latest album by rap group the Wu-Tang Clan, Once Upon A Time In Shaolin. With an uncharacteristically savvy sense of humor, the FBI New York Twitter account tweeted the following:
See the complaint below for details of Shkreli’s crimes.
[gview file=”https://www.jdjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/SEC-v-Shkreli-Complaint.pdf”]