Under fire for raising life-saving drug Daraprim’s price from $13.50 to $750 per pill, the most hated man in America right now has a blemish-free Wikipedia page. And therefore not many are aware that Turing Pharmaceuticals price-gouging CEO Martin Shkreli has a checkered past, which probably proves all those people who are calling him names like “morally bankrupt sociopath”, “scumbag”, “garbage monster”, “heartless”, and “everything that is wrong with capitalism”, right.
A sworn affidavit submitted by ex-Retrophin employee Timothy Pierotti to the Supreme Court of the State of New York alleges that Martin Shkreli engaged in a bizarre campaign of harassment via email, Facebook, LinkedIn, and text message against him, his wife, his four teenage children, elderly father, and other family members for almost a year.
Pierotti produced a letter sent by Shkreli to his wife as one of the evidences. “Your husband has stolen $1.6 million from me and I will get it back. I will go to any length necessary to get it back… Having frozen your husband’s stock account once, I will do so repeatedly until I get what is mine… I hope to see you and your four children homeless and will do whatever I can to assure this,” the letter read.
Before this mean campaign, Retrophin had sued Pierotti in New York state court seeking the recovery of 350,000 shares of Retrophin stock. Retrophin claimed it had facilitated a purchase of its stock at a deep discount by Pierotti with a promise by him that he would work for the company to develop revenue-generating acquisitions. Retrophin accused Pierotti of abruptly reneging on that promise, and then “absconding with the stock”, which then was worth at least $3 million, or about 7,000 times the $400 that he paid for the shares.
Retrophin (which Shkreli founded in 2011) settled a lawsuit against Pierotti out of court in early 2014 after Pierotti’s lawyer asked a New York judge to order Shkreli’s computers to be analyzed on the heels of the allegations.
The controversy didn’t end there. He was ousted as Retrophin’s CEO in 2014 amidst allegations that he had committed stock-trading irregularities and improperly passed off legal settlements with MSMB investors (which Shkreli started in 2008) as consulting agreements.
In August 2015, Retrophin filed a federal lawsuit against Shkreli in New York alleging that he created the biotech and took it public solely to provide stock to MSMB investors when the hedge fund became insolvent. The suit seeks more than $65 million in damages claiming he essentially turned Retrophin into his own private checking account, pulling down $3 million in personal assets even as he dismantled the company from within and pressured others to buy in.
When Shkreli was CEO of Retrophin, he bought the rights to a “decades-old” kidney medication Thiola in 2014 and raised the price to more than 20 times its original cost – from $1 per pill to $30 per pill. That drug treated cystinuria, a lifelong disease for which there is no known cure and which afflicts about 20,000 patients in the United States. When Retrophin bought Thiola, the annual cost for patients zoomed from $54,750 to $109,500.
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Can you guys do more research towards this Tim guy, I feel like we need to know the whole story and the true source of his rage. If Tim guy was innocent, then that would reprotray Shkreli as a twisted mofo.