Ex-pharmaceutical CEO accused at trial of cheating investors
“Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli is either a con man who scammed hedge fund investors of millions or a nerdy genius who made them even richer.
The conflicting portraits were offered Wednesday at opening statements of Shkreli’s securities fraud trial, a case colored by the ex-pharmaceutical CEO’s antics on social media that, despite the urging of his lawyers to lay low, have never subsided
“Is he strange? Yes,” defense attorney Benjamin Brafman told the jurors in federal court in Brooklyn. “Will you find him weird? Yes. But Martin Shkreli, despite all his flaws and dysfunctional personality, is brilliant beyond words.”
In his opening, Assistant U.S. Attorney Karthik Srinivasan accused Shkreli of building a bogus hedge fund empire by telling “lies on top of lies on top of lies.” Though he portrayed himself as a Wall Street wizard, “In reality, he was just a con man,” the prosecutor said.
The defendant, who often slumped in his chair and looked bored during jury selection, listened intently and took notes during the government’s opening. As his lawyer spoke, he beamed at times.
Shkreli, 34, became a pariah in 2015 after a drug company he founded, Turing Pharmaceuticals, spent $55 million for the U.S.
rights to sell a life-saving medicine called Daraprim and promptly raised the price from $13.50 to $750 per pill.
The spotlight intensified later that year with his arrest on charges — unrelated to Daraprim — focusing on a pair of failed hedge funds he founded. After he lost investors’ money through bad trades, he secretly looted Retrophin, another pharmaceutical company where he was CEO, for $10 million to pay back his disgruntled clients, Srinivasan said.
“Rather than owning up to his lies and admitting his investments were a failure, the defendant doubled down by engaging in an even bigger fraud,” he said.