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The Courts Crime

"Most Hated Man In America" Martin Shkreli Arrested On Suspicion of Fraud (ibtimes.co.uk) 245

Posted by samzenpus from the not-exactly-instant-karma dept.
Ewan Palmer writes that everyone's least favorite medication price gouger, Martin Shkreli, has run into some legal problems. According to the article "Pharmaceutical start-up owner Martin Shkreli, dubbed the most hated man in the US over his controversial plans to significantly raise the price of life-saving drugs, has been arrested on suspicion of fraud. Shkreli, 32, who received widespread criticism for hiking up the price of Daraprim from $13 to $750 per pill in September, is being questioned over allegations involving stock from a company he founded in 2011. According to Bloomberg, Shkreli is accused of illegally taking stock from biotechnology Retrophin Inc to pay off debts from unrelated business dealings."
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"Most Hated Man In America" Martin Shkreli Arrested On Suspicion of Fraud More

"Most Hated Man In America" Martin Shkreli Arrested On Suspicion of Fraud

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  • Karma! It IS a bitch! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Chas ( 5144 ) on Thursday December 17, 2015 @08:38PM (#51140815) Homepage Journal

    This guy is going to simultaneously get himself thrown in jail AND get the pharmaceutical industry even MORE heavily regulated with his dumbass shenanigans.

    • Re:Karma! It IS a bitch! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 17, 2015 @08:42PM (#51140837)

      He'll wind up in jail, but I'm not so sure about the other part. The cynic in me thinks the 1% has thrown this little twerp to the wolves as a sacrifice. A troublemaker for the pharma profit machine goes down, the masses are sated, and the rest of the industry keeps chugging along.

      • Re:Karma! It IS a bitch! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by ClickOnThis ( 137803 ) on Thursday December 17, 2015 @08:49PM (#51140873) Journal

        I think his criminal misdeeds have more to do with the financial than the pharmaceutical industry.

        That said, I'm feeling some nice warm fuzzy schadenfreude about this, after what he did with Daraprim.

        • Re: Karma! It IS a bitch! (Score:5, Insightful)

          by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Thursday December 17, 2015 @09:04PM (#51140929) Homepage Journal

          > That said, I'm feeling some nice warm fuzzy schadenfreude about this, after what he did with Daraprim.

          And that's the trap set for you. The system that allows any asshole like this to do the same thing tomorrow is still firmly in place.

          Wake me up when patients can import drugs from abroad, without any hassle, to keep miscreants like Shkreli in check with competition. I'll wear my comfy PJ's as it'll be a while, as corporations continue to gouge patients, leaving the working poor without access to medicine while a few get rich.

          • "Wake me up when patients can import drugs from abroad, without any hassle, to keep miscreants like Shkreli in check with competition."

            As long as there are patents, this will not be possible.

            You should consider a single payer system that keeps prices down by stating how much they will pay.

        • Re:Karma! It IS a bitch! (Score:5, Insightful)

          by MightyMartian ( 840721 ) on Thursday December 17, 2015 @09:11PM (#51140963) Journal

          The guy is obviously a sociopath. It shouldn't surprise anyone that he's a crook, on top of being a shameless, heartless profiteer. He practically basks in his pathological condition. Sadly. jail will do nothing for him, like all sociopaths, he lacks even a basic capacity for human decency. He'll get out and immediately try to find new ways to ingratiate himself and fuck other people over.

          • Re:Karma! It IS a bitch! (Score:4, Informative)

            by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Thursday December 17, 2015 @09:44PM (#51141077)

            The guy is obviously a sociopath.

            According to Google [google.com] CEOs tend to be Psychopaths.

          • The guy is obviously a sociopath.

            The thing that really gets my goat is that he paid $2 million for that one-off Wu Tang Clan album and didn't just share it with the world.

            I hope he does hard time, but chances are he'll just go to a Club Fed and come out and get a book deal.

            http://www.digitaltrends.com/m... [digitaltrends.com]

          • He works in the finance industry. And a CEO. Of course he's a sociopath.

          • Actually, one would hope that him going to jail (for years hopefully), would tell investors to stay the hell away from him. Guy is a sociopath that should either rot in jail or in a cardboard box under a bridge.
          • The main thing Shkreli did was point out exactly how broken government regulations around pharmaceuticals are. The patent on the drug in question expired several decades ago, yet he was still able to lock down the market and keep free-market competitors at bay because of government idiocy.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Sique ( 173459 )
              The government does only what the lobbyists wanted and what the general public let go through unchecked, convinced by a F.U.D. campaign that it would be better to set those rules.

        • Re:Karma! It IS a bitch! (Score:5, Insightful)

          by penguinoid ( 724646 ) on Thursday December 17, 2015 @09:13PM (#51140977) Homepage Journal

          after what he did with Daraprim.

          Bring the nation's attention upon a thoroughly broken system that has been quietly abused for years? (see: people getting their medicine from Canada, guess why)

          • Re:Karma! It IS a bitch! (Score:4, Funny)

            by PCM2 ( 4486 ) on Thursday December 17, 2015 @09:51PM (#51141107) Homepage

            This is really pretty interesting. My parents have trended pretty seriously right wing since moving to Arizona for retirement. They absolutely hated the idea of Obamacare, every single healthcare reform that the Democrats proposed they would shoot down. But they buy their prescriptions in Mexico. That, friends, is literally what George Orwell called "doublethink." And damned if I know how to break its hold.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

              Until the day the customs do an inspection and confiscate the meds because they aren't labeled right.

            • This is really pretty interesting. My parents have trended pretty seriously right wing since moving to Arizona for retirement. They absolutely hated the idea of Obamacare, every single healthcare reform that the Democrats proposed they would shoot down. But they buy their prescriptions in Mexico. That, friends, is literally what George Orwell called "doublethink."

              I used to think you were pretty smart, but now I suspect I was just biased by your low Slashdot ID. There is nothing inconsistent about being opposed to Obamacare and also purchasing your medication from Mexico. The ACA is a handout for insurance companies which does nothing to improve the overall state of health care in the country because it does nothing to increase the number of care providers, and we already had too few of them before the ACA. Mexico is one of the world's larger markets for pharmaceutic [pharmaceut...nology.com]

          • Bring the nation's attention upon a thoroughly broken system that has been quietly abused for years?

            Crime is crime, greed is greed and so on. This guy didn't idealistically bring his own livelihood in danger to highlight the failings of "the broken system". That's like saying the bankers who undermined our economy with irresponsible practices driven by shortsighted greed were heroes - it's a disingenious argument.

        • Your comment is likely true. However, it's assholes like Shkreli that make life more difficult than it needs to be for most people, whether his dealing were in the financial or pharmaceutical industries. His kind is not welcome in free society. He personifies what is wrong with the US today.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by DrXym ( 126579 )

          That said, I'm feeling some nice warm fuzzy schadenfreude about this, after what he did with Daraprim.

          I have some pills that can manage your schadenfreude. Unfortunately as it's an orphan drug so I've decided to jack the price up to $5000 if you want to avail of them.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by pepty ( 1976012 )
        I think it's almost the reverse. The shenanigans he has been pulling have been going on for years but never faced much scrutiny til now. They only affected small patient populations at any given time. Now he has given everyone a single, hatable face to hang the problem on - during election season no less. Plus these particular shenanigans aren't ones that are used by big pharma, but DO affect their reputations, so as long as the reforms are on target they won't be fighting them. On the other hand, the secur

      • I think "cynic" is an understatement. What exactly do you think "the 1%" is? A made-up term for a group of particularly well-off individuals, or a secret society who actually meet and organise under that name, and could orchestrate this entire thing in the name of controlling public opinion?

        Stay on the medication.

    • So it's a WIN WIN.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rtb61 ( 674572 )

        Of course, rather than a pursuit of justice, for what seems like the majority of CEOs do. Nothing at all new, pretty much the expected norm of behaviour (the banskters stole 1000s of times as much) and what they generally get away with in a compliant regulatory framework, full of rich lawyers and lobbyists. Then of course this douche, compared to all the others, is new to the scene and has no family worth speaking of and hence, he must suffer for bringing to the public's attention of the abuses in the phar

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by larwe ( 858929 )
      This is unlikely. He's a white collar criminal of the purest sort. It's extremely likely that he'll get probation, at most. Or exoneration. What it really boils down to is: who has he burned? The question of whether he'll see some time behind actual real bars hinges on whether the people behind the prosecution (not necessarily the SEC, btw - the SEC is merely the complainant...) have a grudge. This could easily be political, too - if he gets convicted, people in the State and Federal Government up to and in

    • If Karma works like it should, he'll end up poor and/or in jail, catch a fatal disease that can be cured by one of the medications for which he jacked up the price, but then be unable to afford it.

    • This guy is going to simultaneously get himself thrown in jail AND get the pharmaceutical industry even MORE heavily regulated with his dumbass shenanigans.

      Don't you think some regulation is long due if a company has the power to raise the price of a drug by over 5700%, just like that?

  • Hello Marty (Score:5, Funny)

    by Earthquake Retrofit ( 1372207 ) on Thursday December 17, 2015 @08:50PM (#51140881) Journal
    Big pharma, meet big karma.

  • Maybe his plan was to become the most hated (Score:4, Interesting)

    by JoeyRox ( 2711699 ) on Thursday December 17, 2015 @08:58PM (#51140913)
    Perhaps his plan was to paint the government as coming after him on a trumped-up charge in retaliation for his raising the price of Daraprim by 5,500%. However a close look reveals he's been under investigation for quite a while, for example:

    http://www.cnbc.com/2015/12/17... [cnbc.com]

  • Shocked to find that he would be involved in fraudulent activities!

  • And now, he gets to meet a number of former Enzyte customers...

  • You listen to some people and you get the idea that the business world is run by Gordon Geckos, that Hollywood caricatures of capitalist villains are the reality and the norm and that the greedy bastards who would do anything to take one dollar more control corporate America.

    Then a person who is really like that actually shows up, and only then, by comparison, do we realize again that the others are not. Every few years some of these guys climb out from Hell to remind us of that. It is Martin Shkreli

    • Then a person who is really like that actually shows up, and only then, by comparison, do we realize again that the others are not.

      I'm going to go ahead and ask for a citation showing that there's a CEO of a major corporation who's not a "greedy bastard who would do anything to take one dollar more".

      I mean, for chrissake, it's in the job description.

      • I'm going to go ahead and ask for a citation showing that there's a CEO of a major corporation who's not a "greedy bastard who would do anything to take one dollar more".

        You want someone to prove a negative. Honest, decent business owners are not news, which means they must be the norm.

        I mean, for chrissake, it's in the job description.

        Only in the fictitious "job descriptions" that you write in your head to justify your hate for them. In the real world, no, that is not "in the job description".

        • Honest, decent business owners are not news

          Honest, decent business owners are not the same as CEO's of major corporations. I was specific.

    • You listen to some people and you get the idea that the business world is run by Gordon Geckos, that Hollywood caricatures of capitalist villains are the reality and the norm and that the greedy bastards who would do anything to take one dollar more control corporate America.

      Studies show that the business world is run by psychopaths: CEOs higher on measurements of psychopathy than inmates at a hospital for the criminally insane. [independentaustralia.net]

  • Wait until he sees his legal bills! (Score:4, Funny)

    by rwyoder ( 759998 ) on Thursday December 17, 2015 @10:00PM (#51141143)

    http://www.newyorker.com/humor... [newyorker.com] ;-)

  • Give this Guy a Protozoal Infection! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Irate Engineer ( 2814313 ) on Thursday December 17, 2015 @10:12PM (#51141187)

    Give this guy a nice itchy, squirmy, oozing protozoal infection, put a prescription of Daraprim in front of him with a price tag on it that reads the amount of profit he enjoyed from jacking up the costs.

    He can have the pills after a few weeks when the insurance company would authorize the payment.

  • The unscrupulous Daraprim stunt went well beyond simple douchebaggery and obviously showed him to be a pure-bred sociopath. God only knows what other skeletons this maggot has in his closet. He obviously had support, though. Once he goes down I hope they don't stop with him. I'd like to know what sort of vile company had the nerve to put this asshole in charge.
  • I thought the most hated man in America was Trump or Obama, depending on the time of day.
  • When Shkreli was interviewed about his price gouging he at one point tried to defend it this way: [cbsnews.com]

    the drug was unprofitable at the former price, so any company selling it would be losing money

    That is a really lame excuse to buy out a company and jack up the price of their product. He really should have just said "we did it because we can, and we knew nobody would stop us". If he really thinks he can fool the world with that line of bullshit he'll get another thing coming later. After all, if the product was such a loser, the proper thing to do would be to allow the market to take over and allow t

    • After all, if the product was such a loser, the proper thing to do would be to allow the market to take over and allow the company to fail, no?

      What more needs to be done to "allow the market to take over" when a drug is "not subject to any unexpired patent"? (ref) [wikipedia.org] Any company that wanted to cut into the market could have started manufacturing and selling it for less.

      • After all, if the product was such a loser, the proper thing to do would be to allow the market to take over and allow the company to fail, no?

        What more needs to be done to "allow the market to take over" when a drug is "not subject to any unexpired patent"? (ref) Any company that wanted to cut into the market could have started manufacturing and selling it for less.

        My point is that he is trying to claim this was driven by his altruistic humanistic interests when quite plainly that is not the case. There is no contesting that he bought the company to make money. He can try to weasel out of it any way he wants, but the facts are out there for all to see. Why did he need to interfere with the company who previously made it? Why is he interfering with the market this way?

        Just as you said someone could have come in and undercut the original manufacturer, someone cou

  • http://www.newyorker.com/humor... [newyorker.com]

    If only...you couldn't maximize the karma any further. :)

  • Outside-USA sources - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] , http://blueskydrugs.com/Produc... [blueskydrugs.com] . and an info post from a 'supposed supplier in CA - http://www.dailykos.com/story/... [dailykos.com]

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