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Martin Shkreli found guilty of fraud (as another Martin Shkreli was arraigned for money laundering)
August 04, 2017
Self-proclaimed “pharma bro” Martin Shkreli has been convicted of securities fraud in federal court in Brooklyn. A jury found Shkreli guilty of two counts of securities fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud, and not guilty of five other charges, CNBC reports.
He faces up to 20 years in prison. Prosecutors said he misled investors in two hedge funds he ran, losing money and investing some of their funds in a separate pharmaceutical company called Retrophin, even as he claimed to be making money. He then used money from the drug business to repay them, prosecutors said.
Shkreli also gained infamy for raising the price of Daraphim, an anti-parasite drug, more than 5,000% as the head of drug company Turing Pharmaceuticals, and has earned notoriety as an internet troll, including getting suspended from Twitter for harassing a journalist covering his businesses.
Shkreli’s attorney says he plans to appeal the verdict, the Washington Post reports. “This was a witch hunt of epic proportions,” Shkreli told the Post.
Earlier in the day, courtroom observers got a laugh when another defendant, also named Martin Shkreli, appeared in the same courtroom, to be arraigned on money-laundering-related charges related to alleged drug trafficking by a group that has also been accused of trafficking weapons from Kosovo. The two Shkrelis are unrelated, as are the cases, though both are of Albanian descent, CNBC reports.SM
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