Shkreli’s infamous 4,000% price hike earns him a lifetime pharma ban

A federal court on Friday barred convicted fraudster Martin Shkreli from working in the pharmaceutical industry again in any capacity and ordered him to repay $64.6 million in profits from his infamous price-raising scheme. of the drug Daraprim by more than 4,000 percent. .

U.S. District Judge Denise Cote issued lifetime ban after finding that Shkreli had engaged in anti-competitive practices to protect Daraprim’s monopoly profits.

According to a lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission and seven states – New York, California, Illinois, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia – Shkreli, his former pharmaceutical company Vyera (formerly Turing) and former Vyera CEO Kevin Mulleady, have created a “network of anti-competitive restrictions to regulate competition” in 2015 after buying the rights from Daraprim.

Daraprim is an inexpensive, decades-old antiparasitic drug used to treat toxoplasmosis, which often sickens people with weakened immune systems (such as AIDS patients) and can be fatal to newborn babies. Shkreli and Mulleady reportedly implemented a complex system that kept the drug out of reach of competitors, blocked suppliers from selling critical drug ingredients to competitors, and blocked the release of sales data that would reveal the size of the market to competitors.

Meanwhile, Shkreli and Mulleady sharply increased Daraprim’s list price by more than 4,000%, from $17.50 to $750 per tablet.

A better tomorrow

In Cote’s decision on Friday, she concluded that Shkreli “was the mastermind of [Vyera’s] unlawful conduct and the person primarily responsible for it over the years.” Her lifetime ban and order to pay $64.6 million in restitution “serves the interests of justice,” she wrote.

In A press release On Friday, New York Attorney General Letitia James celebrated the decision with some references to the Wu-Tang Clan.

“‘Envy, greed, lust and hate’ don’t just ‘separate’, but they clearly motivated Mr. Shkreli and his partner to illegally raise the price of a life-saving drug while life of Americans was at stake,” Attorney General James said, referencing Wu-Tang Clan’s words. A better tomorrow.

“But Americans can rest easy because Martin Shkreli is no longer a pharma brother…The rich and powerful don’t play by their own rules, so it seems money doesn’t rule everything around of Mr. Shkreli,” the lawyer said. General James continued.

Friday’s decision follows a settlement announced last month in which Vyera and its parent company, Phoenixus, agreed to pay up to $40 million to victims of the Daraprim scheme. The settlement also required companies to make Daraprim available to competitors at cost and prohibited them from participating in a similar program for 10 years. Mulleady was banned from the pharmaceutical industry for seven years.

Shkreli is currently serving a seven-year prison sentence following a 2017 securities fraud conviction linked to two hedge funds he ran before the Daraprim scheme. Following his conviction for fraud, he was ordered to confiscate $7.36 million in assets, including the only copy of the Wu-Tang album. Once upon a time in Shaolin, which he bought in 2015 at auction from Wu-Tang member RZA for $2 million.