Price-gouger Shkreli to face new charges over illegal financial dealings of Retrophin Inc
04 Jun 2016
Prosecutors brought new charges against Martin Shkreli pertaining to his illegal financial dealings at his former drug company Retrophin Inc, which involved using employees and consultants to conceal his control of stock.
The new eight-count indictment, comes on top of a conspiracy charge and reveals e-mail communications between Shkreli and a former corporate lawyer, Evan Greebel, who stands accused of helping the notorious biotech founder cover up securities fraud.
Shkreli, who was at the centre of a controversy last year over drug-pricing, faces charges of defrauding investors in hedge funds he founded and using $11 million in assets from Retrophin to pay them off. Shkreli and Greebel had pleaded not guilty.
"There is nothing in the new indictment that ?changes the flawed theory of the case as applied to Shkreli," his lawyer Ben Brafman said in an e-mail yesterday.
In the expanded indictment Shkreli is accused of taking control of shares he was not permitted to own, parking them with associates, and using them to help pay debts.
When an employee broke planed to sell them instead, Shkreli threatened in an e-mail to sue for ''failing to honor the agreement.''
Shkreli earlier, pleaded not guilty to charges he lost investors' money through bad trades and looted the pharmaceutical company to pay them back.
Shkreli gained notoriety and earned public ire last year, after Turing Pharmaceuticals, the company he founded, spent $55 million for the US rights to sell a life-saving medicine called Daraprim and promptly hiked the price about 5,000 per cent from $13.50 to $750 per pill (See: Turing vows to cut Daraprim drug price after furore over 5,000% hike and Turing does volte face on cutting price of drug Daraprim) In February, he irked US lawmakers by calling them imbeciles and exercising of his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination in a hearing on the issue before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee (Price-gouging drug executive Shkreli calls lawmakers 'imbeciles').
