Martin Shkreli, the former executive of a pharmaceutical company who ordered drastic increases in the prices of a life-saving drug, has been banned from the industry for life.
On Friday , Judge Denise Cote ordered him to repay $64.6 millions of dollars in profits that he obtained when buying the patent of a drug and then greatly increase its price.
The judge ruled that Shkreli’s actions violated antitrust laws.
Shkreli is currently serving a seven-year prison sentence for defrauding investors and using the funds of one of the companies he founded in his favor.
But this new judicial decision has to do with an event that happened in 2015, when he decided to increase the price of Daraprim, a medical ment that is used to treat toxoplasmosis and malaria, making its price vary from $13.50 to $750 dollars.
It was an increase of about 4000%, overnight to the morning.
Shkreli also created supply agreements to prevent competitors from offering a generic version of the off-patent drug, which is used to treat parasitic disease in pregnant women and HIV patients, and is critical to saving their lives.
“Pharma Bro”
Known in Wall Street as “Pharma Bro”, Shkreli’s highly unpopular actions earned him the nickname of the “most hated man in the United States”.
The businessman, who currently has 38 years ago, became especially well known when the Democrat Hillary Clinton gave him as an example -in the middle of the electoral campaign in 2016- on the excesses in the price of medicines.
Son of Albanian immigrants, Shkreli founded his first investment fund with 21 years.
In 2012, created Retrophin Pharmaceuticals, a company dedicated to the treatment of rare diseases, and two years later, its shares had appreciated from $3 to $20 Dollars.
Later he opened Turing Pharmaceuticals -which later became Vyera Pharmaceuticals– through which you purchased Daraprim in 2015.
- Why will the “most hated man in America”, Martin Shkreli, go to jail?
Plus recently, in 2020, seven states and the Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit against him saying he had violated state and federal laws prohibiting anti-competitive conduct.
U.S. District Judge Denise Cote ruled Shkreli as the “main engine” of the plan to increase the price of Daraprim.
” It was his idea and he directed every step of that decision,” Cote wrote.
New York Attorney General Letitia James, one of the officials who filed the lawsuit , celebrated the judge’s decision.
James said that “the envy, greed, lust and hatred“ was what motivated Shkreli and his partner to illegally increase “the price of a life-saving drug, while the lives of many Americans hung in the balance.”
“But Americans can rest easy because Martin Shkreli is no longer a Pharma Bro,” he added.
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