Martin Shkreli ordered to return nearly $65 million and banned from pharmaceutical industry for life
CBSN
A federal court has ordered convicted pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli to return $64.6 million worth of profits he made from hiking the price of a lifesaving drug, New York Attorney General Letitia James announced Friday. The court also said the so-called "Pharma Bro" is banned for life from participating in the pharmaceutical industry.
"'Envy, greed, lust, and hate,' don't just 'separate,' but they obviously motivated Mr. Shkreli and his partner to illegally jack up the price of a life-saving drug as Americans' lives hung in the balance," James, who, along with the Federal Trade Commission and seven states, filed the lawsuit against Shkreli in 2020, said in a statement Friday. "But Americans can rest easy because Martin Shkreli is a pharma bro no more."
In 2015, Shkreli's company Turing Pharmaceuticals — later renamed Vyera — bought the drug Daraprim, which was then the only drug approved by the Food and Drug Administration to treat a parasitic disease that occurs in some AIDS, malaria and cancer patients. Under Vyera, the lifesaving drug shot up in price by more than 4,000% overnight, and the company changed its distribution method to delay and impede generic competition, James said.
