‘PHARMA BRO’ CAN’T KEEP QUIET ON EVE OF FRAUD TRIAL.

Trial begins for U.S. federal securities fraud

NEWYORK • “Pharma Bro” just won’t keep his mouth shut.

Even before his federal securities fraud trial began Monday, Martin Shkreli blatantly defied his attorneys’ advice to lay low.

The former pharmaceutical CEO, who became a pariah after raising the cost of a life- saving drug 5,000 per cent, has been preening for cameras and trolling on social media, potentially complicating his defence.

“I’m excited,” Shkreli said of the trial in a brief phone call last week to The Associated Press. “I can’t wait.” Jury selection got underway Monday, and opening statements could occur as early as Tuesday.

Since his high- profile arrest in late 2015 when he was led into court in a grey hoodie, Shkreli has been free on bail and free to speak his mind.

He went on Twitter to label members of Congress “imbeciles” for demanding to know why his company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, raised the price of Daraprim, a drug used to treat toxoplasmosis and HIV, from US$13.50 to US$750 per pill.

He took to YouTube for a series of lessons on chemistry and stock market analysis. His Twitter posts mocking a freelance journalist turned so creepy — one showed a fake photo of him canoodling with her — that his account was shut down. And on Facebook, he mused about the possibility of being “unjustly imprisoned.”

The 34- year- old Shkreli “travels to the beat of a very unique drummer,” exasperated- sounding defence attorney Benjamin Brafman said at a pretrial hearing this month.

Columbia law professor John Coffee compared the situation to U. S. President Donald Trump’s tweeting. “A lawyer can caution him,” he said. “But just like Trump, he doesn’t have to listen.”

Though Shkreli’s notoriety came from Daraprim, the federal securities fraud case is unrelated. Prosecutors say that after Shkreli lost millions of dollars through bad trades through his side business hedge fund, he looted a second pharmaceutical company for US$ 11 million to pay them back. The defence has argued that he had good intentions. “Everybody got paid back in this case,” his lawyer said. “Whatever else he did wrong, he ultimately made them whole.”

The defence has floated the possibility that it would put Shkreli on the witness stand to try to highlight how he grew up in a working- class Albanian family in Brooklyn, taught himself chemistry, interned at a financial firm founded by CNBC’s Jim Cramer and struck out on his own in biotechnology startups.

Prosecutors call it a ploy to portray the boyish- looking Shkreli as “a Horatio Alger-like figure.”

The real Shkreli is a con man often undone by his own mouth, they say.