http://news.yahoo.com/turing-ceo-martin-shkreli-custody-securities-probe-133722669--finance.html
This guy is a supreme asshole.
Shkreli was charged in an indictment unconnected to the drug price hikes imposed by his company Turing Pharmaceuticals. The charges instead involve his actions at another pharmaceutical company, Retrophin, which he ran as CEO up until last year.
Prosecutors said that in a "Ponzi-like scheme" between 2009 and 2014, Shkreli lost hedge fund investors' money through bad trades, then raided Retrophin for $11 million in cash and stock to pay back his disgruntled clients.
Shkreli "engaged in multiple schemes to ensnare investors through a web of lies and deceit," U.S. Attorney Robert Capers said in a statement.
Shkreli was charged with securities fraud and conspiracy. A second defendant, lawyer Evan Greebel, of Scarsdale, New York, was charged with conspiracy and also pleaded not guilty.
If convicted, both men could get up to 20 years in prison.
In August, Shkreli's Turing Pharmaceuticals spent $55 million for the U.S. rights to sell Daraprim, a 62-year-old drug for a rare parasitic infection, and promptly raised the price from $13.50 to $750 per pill. The drug is the only approved treatment for toxoplasmosis, a disease that mainly strikes pregnant women, cancer patients and AIDS patients.
The move sparked outrage on the presidential campaign trail, helped prompt a Capitol Hill hearing on drug prices, and turned the Brooklyn-born Shkreli into the new face of corporate greed. Headlines called him such things as "America's most hated man," the "drug industry's villain," ''biotech's bad boy" — and those were just the more printable names.
Shkreli said the company would cut the price of Daraprim. Last month, however, Turing reneged. Instead, the company is reducing what it charges hospitals for Daraprim by as much as 50 percent.
While most patients' copayments will be $10 or less a month, insurance companies will be stuck with the bulk of the tab, potentially driving up future treatment and insurance costs.
Shkreli said that insurance and other programs would allow patients to get the drug despite the cost and that the profits are helping fund research into new treatments.
But he also made an unapologetic business-is-business argument for the price jump. In fact, he recently said he probably should have raised it more.
"No one wants to say it, no one's proud of it, but this is a capitalist society, a capitalist system and capitalist rules," he said in an interview at the Forbes Healthcare Summit this month. "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."
The Campaign for Accountability, a nonprofit watchdog group that urged Congress to investigate Shkreli's price increases, called his arrest "long overdue" and added: "He has avoided accountability despite a pattern of fraudulent behavior."
In August, though, Retrophin sued Shkreli for more than $65 million, accusing him of using his control of the company to enrich himself and to pay off the claims of financial fund investors he had defrauded.
Last month, Shkreli was named chairman and CEO of KaloBios Pharmaceuticals, a struggling cancer drug developer. After his arrest, its stock fell by more than half Thursday before trading in the company was suspended.
This guy is a supreme asshole.
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