Martin Shkreli is a well-known American businessman of Albanian descent, co-founder of hedge funds Elea Capital, MSMB Capital Management and MSMB Healthcare. Martin gained worldwide fame for speculating in the drug market. He is co-founder and former executive director of the biotechnological company Retrophin, as well as the owner of Turing Pharmaceuticals. Martin Shkreli is also the CEO of the start-up company Gödel Systems, founded in August 2016.
The most hated person in the USA
In September 2015, Martin was widely criticized when Turing Pharmaceuticals obtained a license to manufacture the drug Daraprim (for the treatment of toxoplasmosis and cystozosporosis) and increased the price of the product 56 times. For this speculation, the businessman began to be identified as "the most hated person in the United States."
Martin Shkreli was arrested by the FBI in December 2015 and charged with securities fraud. Subsequently, the American businessman resigned as CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals and was replaced by Chairman of the Board Ron Tilles. Shkreli was found guilty of two facts of fraud - with securities in a pharmaceutical company and in fraud with investment assets under the Ponzi scheme (that is, the creation of a financial pyramid). The businessman illegally withdrew $ 11 million from his company’s accounts in order to pay off the debt of his own investment fund MSMB.
Biography
Martin Shkreli was born April 1, 1983 in Brooklyn (New York, United States of America) in a family of immigrants from Albania and Croatia. He was brought up according to Catholic laws, attended Sunday school. In addition to Martin, the family also had a brother and two sisters.
He studied at Hunter High School (college) for gifted students. In his last years he dropped out due to lack of interest in subjects, but received the necessary diploma loans, which allowed him to get an internship at the hedge fund on Wall Street, which was led by Jim Kramer (media personality, author of books on investment programs). Martin was only 17 years old when he was hired.
In 2004, he received an economics degree in finance from Baruch College. Here he began to study chemistry in depth to develop a drug for resistant depression, which suffered one of his family members. In March 2015, Hunter College announced that Martin had donated one million dollars to him.
Career
While studying at college to them. Baruch Martin began to engage in investment business in the field of biotechnological technologies. The guy did not have a medical education, but nevertheless decided to try his hand at the business of this area. Working for Jim Cramer, he predicted a downward trend in biotechnology products, and as a result, the hedge fund made a lot of money from this. In 2003, the pharmaceutical company Regeneron Pharmaceuticals tested the drug for weight loss, and 19-year-old Shkreli predicted that stocks would fall. As a result, with his forecast, Martin attracted the attention of the US tax and securities board, whose representatives interrogated Shkreli for insider information over a long period of time. However, the commission was unable to prove its suspicions of violation of the law.
After four years of working as an assistant in the company, Kramer Shkreli became a financial analyst in investment companies such as Intrepid Capital Management and USB Wealth Management (the largest Swiss financial holding).
Elea Capital Management
In 2006, novice businessman Martin Shkreli founded his own hedge fund called ECM (Elea Capital Management). In 2007, the financial company Lehman Brothers sued Elea in a New York court for failing to cover an option transaction. In the end, Lehman Brothers won a lawsuit in the amount of $ 2.3 million to ECM. In March 2008, Lehman Brothers Investment Bank declared bankruptcy due to the global financial crisis of the late 2000s. The total debt of the company amounted to 613 billion US dollars.
How Martin "kills" competitors …
In September 2009, Martin became a co-founder of the MSMB Capital Management investment fund, which got its name from the initials of two portfolio managers - Martin Shkreli and Marek Biestek.
In 2010, Martin asked the Food and Drug Administration of the United States of America to review the case for the pharmaceutical company MannKind. In his statement, he points out that when testing a new drug for diabetes from the pharmaceutical organization MannKind, some problems were identified. In court, Martin Shkreli called for society and the market to disapprove of this product. At the same time, his investment fund puts MannKind on a downgrade and starts selling their shares without having them available.
Thanks to Martin, the products of the pharmaceutical company MannKind were only approved in 2014. It is worth noting that in 2011, an American businessman, according to the same plan, bankrupted the company Navidea Biopharmaceuticals, which was developing drugs for the diagnosis of cancer called Lymphoseek.
Businessman and "pharmacist" Martin Shkreli: a history of speculation on the price of drugs
In September 2014, Retrophin, which was created by Martin in 2011, as a portfolio of investment securities of the financial company MSMB CM, acquired the patent rights for the drug Thiola. This drug has been used to treat an autosomal recessive cystinuria disease. Subsequently, Martin sets the price for the drug two thousand percent more, that is, a factor of 20 times. In October of the same year, the businessman was forced to resign as CEO at Retrophin. After that, the Retrophin pharmacy company sues Martin Shkreli with a lawsuit in the amount of 65 million US dollars, claiming that he allegedly violated his debt due to loyalty to the biopharmaceutical company. Also, the businessman was accused of violating the rules of exchange trading with securities. Shkreli and some of his business partners were criminally charged by a U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of New York in January 2015.
In February 2016, Imprimis Pharmaceuticals, a biopharmaceutical company, announced that it had developed a low-cost alternative to Thiola. In May of the same year, sales began on two recipes.
History with Turing Pharmaceuticals
In February 2015, after leaving Retrophin, Martin founded Turing. The company began to develop with three drugs that were purchased from Retrophin: Oxytocin (Ocitocin), Daraprim (Daraprim) and Vecamyl (Vecamil). Designed to treat the immune system, as well as cancer and HIV diseases.
Martin Shkreli thought out the following business strategy for the company: to obtain licenses for generic medicines and increase their cost in price. Martin wanted to make a huge easy profit for himself and the company. His goal was not to develop and market his own medicines.
Since markets for generic drugs have a narrow entry threshold, and obtaining regulatory permission to produce a generic version is an expensive undertaking, Shkreli calculated that with a closed distribution of the product and the absence of a lot of competition, he would be able to set high prices. The cost of Daraprim increased from $ 13.5 to $ 750. After this incident, Martin fell into the spotlight of the world media, and also became a victim of public outcry.
Public response
A wide circle of people on the planet became aware of who Martin Shkreli is. He was invited to television in order to find out the reason for the sharp increase in the price of drugs. The businessman argued his position that this medicinal product has been produced since 1953 and needs to be modified, and for this, big finances are needed. Martin confidently stated that the company would not reduce prices for its products. After this broadcast, the society hated Shkreli. Newspapers, magazines and online publications began to dazzle with the headlines "Martin Shkreli - the most hated businessman in the states" and call him "the enemy of the people number one", "Jew" and "villain". After that, the businessman promised that the money would be invested in researching new drugs, but the public did not believe his words.
Martin Shkreli's Bad Behavior
Martin is known for his stupid behavior and shocking tricks. For example, in May 2017, Martin’s Twitter account was deleted due to insulting attacks on journalist Lauren Dook. In the same year, he wrote a post on his Facebook page that he would give $ 5, 000 to anyone who brought him a tuft of hair from Hillary Clinton. Later, under pressure from federal prosecutors, he officially apologized for his words, but this did not help him.
The world knows another trick of businessman Martin Shkreli … In November 2015, he won the auction for the sale of the exclusive album Wu-Tang in a single copy for $ 2 million. In October 2016, Martin announced on Twitter that he would post the album for free download on the net if Donald Trump won the US presidential election and would destroy the album if Hillary Clinton won. After Trump's victory, Martin organized an online broadcast, which included a couple of Wu-Tang tracks.
The following year, the businessman decided to make himself a musical gift for February 14, turning to rapper Kanye West with a request to purchase an exclusive album for the amount of 10 to 15 million dollars. Negotiations with Martin led a certain representative of a rapper named Dacan. The deal was completed, but Shkreli was left without music - he ran into a scammer.
