Saturday 15 January 2022
“Most Hated Man in America”
Shkreli is banned from working in the pharmaceutical industry
Pharmaceutical manager Martin Shkreli is in prison for financial fraud. The “most hated man in the USA” will no longer be allowed to work in his industry after his release. A federal judge will decide. He also has to pay compensation to his victims.
The US pharmaceutical and hedge fund manager Martin Shkreli, once dubbed “the most hated man in the USA”, is no longer allowed to work in the pharmaceutical industry after serving his sentence. That ordered a US federal judge on Friday. In addition, the convicted financial fraudster has to pay his victims compensation totaling 64.6 million dollars (56.4 million euros).
Shkreli, 38, has been in prison since 2017 and was sentenced to seven years in prison for financial fraud. He was found guilty of using illegal methods to inflate the value of two hedge funds he previously ran and of fooling investors. His release is scheduled for October 2023, but he could be released this year if he is well behaved.
Shkreli was once considered the enfant terrible of the pharmaceutical industry. He had specialized in buying the patents of cheap drugs and then drastically inflating the price. Shkreli became a hated figure in the United States because, as the then head of the Turing pharmaceutical company, he had willfully increased the price of the AIDS drug Daraprim by more than 50 times: overnight the price had risen from $13.50 per tablet to $750 .
The outrage over the drastic price increase for a drug that is vital for some patients was huge, the BBC described Shkreli as “America’s most hated man”, the Washington Post as “public enemy number 1”. However, this scandal was not the subject of the financial fraud process.