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Martin Shkreli, the former pharmaceutical company executive who ordered drastic price increases on a life-saving drug, has been banned from the industry for life.
On Friday, Judge Denise Cote ordered him to repay $64.6 million in profit that he got by buying the patent on a drug and then greatly increasing its price.
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The judge ruled that Shkreli’s actions violated antitrust laws.
Shkreli He 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.
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But this new judicial decision has to do with an event that happened in 2015, when it decided to increase the price of Daraprim, a drug used to treat toxoplasmosis and malaria, ranging in price from US$13.50 to US$750.
It was an increase of about 4000%, overnight.
Shkreli also created supply agreements to prevent competitors from offering a generic version of the off-patent drug, which is used to treat the parasitic disease in pregnant women and HIV patients and is critical to saving their lives.
“Pharma Bro”
Known on Wall Street as “Pharma Bro”, Shkreli’s highly unpopular actions earned him the nickname “America’s Most Hated Man”.
The businessman, who is currently 38 years old, became especially well known when the Democrat Hillary Clinton He gave him as an example -in the middle of the electoral campaign in 2016- on the excesses in the price of medicines.
The son of Albanian immigrants, Shkreli founded his first investment fund at the age of 21.
In 2012, he created Retrophin Pharmaceuticals, a company dedicated to the treatment of rare diseases, and two years later, its shares had appreciated from US$3 to US$20.
He then opened Turing Pharmaceuticals – later renamed Vyera Pharmaceuticals- through which it bought Daraprim in 2015.
Most recently, in 2020, seven states and the US Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit against him saying he had violated state and federal laws prohibiting anti-competitive conduct.
US District Judge Denise Cote called Shkreli a 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 “envy, greed, lust and hate” it 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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