Say what you will about Martin Shkreli and his increasingly apparent sociopathy, but you cannot deny the pharma bro’s work ethic. While a less driven and more self-aware felon might find himself plumbing the depths of despair and self-pity when forcibly relocated to a federal prison, at least for a little while, not so Shkreli, who wouldn’t allow bars or the rules behind them to hold him back from, say, running his companies and more than he did when he was a free man. He’s also kept busy filing and responding to lawsuits, solving the coronavirus, and, of course, starting and ending a romantic relationship.
But even all of that wasn’t enough to fill the former Pharma Bro’s incarcerated hours, and he certainly wasn’t going to let a fraud conviction and seven-year sentence keep him from (allegedly) defending the monopoly on that life-saving drug he’d repriced 5,455% higher he’d (allegedly) so carefully built.
Vyera kept a monopoly on the drug by severely limiting its supply, and making its distributors, and their customers, sign agreements not to sell the medicine to companies that might use the samples to make generic alternatives, the lawsuit alleges./In August 2019, while Shkreli was in federal prison, he told Muleady and Akeel Mithani, another Vyera executive, that they should start limiting sales of the drug to one bottle at a time./“Shkreli urged Mulleady to ‘really carefully screen every doctor; and ensure that no one could ‘sell more than one bottle at a time’ to prevent a generic company from “get[ting its] hands on anything,’” the lawsuit alleges.
‘Pharma Bro’ Martin Shkreli ran pharma monopoly scheme from prison: lawsuit [N.Y. Daily News]