Shkreli was arraigned on these charges Thursday afternoon in United States District Court. He paid his own $5 million bail— $3 million more than the $2 million he was hoping to pay to bail out jailed Brooklyn rapper Bobby Shmurda—and was released.
If you frequent Facebook, or follow the news, you might have heard about the dick who bought a whole lot of anti-retrovirals, but then upped the price just to earn extra dollar bills. Well, in the latest news, karma just proved how much of a bitch it can be and got him right back.
Martin Shkreli is the price-gouging CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals and was arrested yesterday morning over seven accounts of securities and wire fraud for an alleged “Ponzi-like” scheme involving two hedge funds and pharmaceutical company Retrophin.
It all pretty much shatters the dude as an investor and reveals the story of an hedge-fund manager who lost all his money in the 2000s and has been struggling since.
As alleged, Martin Shkreli engaged in multiple schemes to ensnare investors through a web of lies and deceit.
His plots were matched only by efforts to conceal the fraud, which led him to operate his companies, including a publicly traded company [Retrophin], as a Ponzi scheme, where he used the assets of the new entity to pay off debts from the old entity.
He now stands to face a maximum time of 20 years in prison as all of the current charges pertain to companies that Shkreli operated between 2009 – 2014. You would think that the prison time would have something do with his egotistical price increase of Daraprim, a drug that treats the parasitic disease toxoplasmosis, but that investigation is currently ongoing.
It all began back in 2009 when Shkreli – what a name – misrepresented his hedge fund MSMB Capital to investors by “omitting the fact that he had lost all of the money from his prior hedge fund and had a $2.3 million default judgment against him from Lehman Brothers.” Before the hedge fund collapsed, it’s alleged that Shkreli withdrew more than $200 000 for personal use.
Then, the dude began a new hedge fund in 2011 MSMB Healthcare, courting investors while concealing his past. He then used assets from this hedge fund to pay off some of his personal debts.
Shkreli then used his pharmaceutical company Retrophin in the same manner, but this time along with an outside counsel, Evan Greebel who was charged as well. Between March 2011 and September 2014 the pair – along with other co-conspirators, “purportedly used Retrophin assets to pay off their previous investors” basically using it as their personal piggy bank. The company then replaced Shkreli as a CEO over a year ago:
Following his departure, the company authorized an independent investigation of Mr. Shkreli’s conduct, publicly disclosed its findings, and has fully cooperated with the government investigations into Mr. Shkreli. Until we have had the opportunity to review the charges against Mr. Shkreli, we cannot comment further.
Disguising their actions as “consulting fees” the pair used fake settlement agreements to quiet their defrauded investors. Consisting of a series of settlement and sham consulting agreements, the actions resulted in Retrophin and its investors suffering a loss of $11 million. The charges are only one example of what’s to come of the FBI investigation.
Poor trading in the past resulted in a loss of all but $331 of a $600 000 investment.
An expert trader you say? Shkreli thought of himself as such and even offered advice on stocks to his Twitter followers through live-streaming videos, and even had the cheek to call himself “the most successful Albanian to ever walk the face of this earth.”
So all his actions are to stay ahead of his previously defrauded investors. When asked if he had increased the price of the antiretroviral drug Daraprim in order to cover his debts, the investigators replied that it was a part of their investigation.
Shkreli was arraigned on these charges Thursday afternoon in United States District Court. He paid his own $5 million bail— $3 million more than the $2 million he was hoping to pay to bail out jailed Brooklyn rapper Bobby Shmurda—and was released.
But have you heard about the Wu-Tang Clan album? Here’s the real reason karma struck back:
Shkreli purchased an art peice/rap album from the Wu-Tang Clan for $2 million – of which there is only one copy. No one but him has ever heard the album and just before his arrest he claimed that he would never play it for anyone else unless they served him up sexual favours. Dick.
Unfortunately, the feds did not seize the album but joked about it instead:
[source: gawker&mashable&thedailybeast]
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