Martin Shkreli, the former drug company executive who made headlines by jacking up the price of a lifesaving drug before he was found guilty of defrauding investors, was sentenced to 7 years and a $75,000 fine on Friday. The sentence from US District Judge Kiyo Matsumoto in federal court in Brooklyn, New York, was shorter than the 15 years asked for by prosecutors but much longer than the 12 to 18 months Shkreli\u2019s lawyers had sought.<\/p>\n
Shkreli\u2019s lawyer Benjamin Brafman told the judge before the sentencing that Shkreli, 34, suffered from depression and an anxiety disorder and was a \u201csomewhat broken\u201d person, whom the government wanted to \u201cthrow away.\u201d Assistant US Attorney Jacquelyn Kasulis had said a 15 year sentence was justified in part because Shkreli\u2019s crimes were not an \u201cisolated lapse in judgment,\u201d but a pattern of conduct including separate frauds for his two hedge funds and for his drug company Retrophin Inc.<\/p>\n
The Brooklyn-born entrepreneur became known as the \u201cPharma Bro\u201d in September 2015 after founding Turing Pharmaceuticals, buying the anti-parasitic drug Daraprim and raising its price by 5,000 percent to $750 per pill. Shkreli was indicted for the unrelated securities fraud charges in December 2015. At the hearing, Shkreli had choked up as he said he had learned from his mistakes.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is no conspiracy to take down Martin Shkreli. I took down Martin Shkreli with my disgraceful and shameful actions,\u201d he said. A jury in August found Shkreli guilty of defrauding investors in two hedge funds he ran, MSMB Capital and MSMB Healthcare, by sending them fake account statements and concealing huge losses. He was also convicted of scheming to prop up the stock price of Retrophin, the drug company he founded in 2011.<\/p>\n
The $75,000 fine comes on top of $7.36 million in forfeiture Shkreli had already been ordered to pay following his conviction. Brafman, noting that he was old enough to be Shkreli\u2019s father, said his client had not always been easy to work with. \u201cThere are times when I want to hug him and hold him and comfort him and there are times when I want to punch him in the face,\u201d Brafman said. Kasulis said Brafman was trying to portray Shkreli as \u201ca child.\u201d \u201cMr. Shkreli is about to turn 35 years old,\u201d she said<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Martin Shkreli, the former drug company executive who made headlines by jacking up the price of a lifesaving drug before he was found guilty of defrauding investors, was sentenced to 7 years and a $75,000 fine on Friday. The sentence from US District Judge Kiyo Matsumoto in federal court in Brooklyn, New York, was shorter […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":24413,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24412","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24412","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24412"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24412\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24414,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24412\/revisions\/24414"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24413"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24412"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24412"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}