Martin Shkreli sentenced to Seven Years ...
 

... for fraud.

You remember "Pharma Bro" Shkreli, who raised the price of life-saving medication by more than 5,000%? He has been sentenced to seven years for federal fraud charges related to hedge funds.


As plenty of people have pointed out, he was not punished for price gouging poor, desperate people -- even though it's all but certain that some people died because of his actions. What he was punished for is misleading investors -- that is, for taking money from people who were (mostly) rich.


Screw poor people and get away scot-free, even if some of them die as a result of your actions. Screw rich people, and you go to jail.

Re: Martin Shkreli sentenced to Seven Years ...
 

An activist I follow keeps mentioning how if you really want to get people to listen and care, fuck with their money. It's amazing how true it really is.

Re: Martin Shkreli sentenced to Seven Years ...
 

I was assuming it was an Al Capone situation. Charge him with the stuff that's going to stick, not the stuff that risks getting thrown out or losing.

Re: Martin Shkreli sentenced to Seven Years ...
 

The real lesson of this story is that the Wu-Tang Clan ain't nothin' to fuck with.

Re: Martin Shkreli sentenced to Seven Years ...
 

^That.

Watch people lose their blessed minds at a cash register if so much as a nickel is omitted from the change.

Re: Martin Shkreli sentenced to Seven Years ...
 

This is sort of how I feel.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en-gb"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Martin Shkreli shamelessly exploited and mocked people with AIDS and if I could wear his tears he shed in that courtroom in a vial around my neck i'd spend whole afternoons idly dandling it by a silver chain and watching it catch the glint of the midsummer sun</p>&mdash; Anthony Oliveira (@meakoopa) <a href="https://twitter.com/meakoopa/status/972206852837539841?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">9 March 2018</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

Re: Martin Shkreli sentenced to Seven Years ...
 

Shkreli is a huge douche, but the only thing that sets him apart from the rest of that industry is his theatrics.

I'm glad he's going to prison and I'm glad he's crying, but the problem is capitalism, not Martin Shkreli.

(I'm not 100% against capitalism in every domain, just a lot of them.)

Re: Martin Shkreli sentenced to Seven Years ...
 

Prison commissary increases lube price by 5000% ahead of Martin Shkreli’s arrival

Re: Martin Shkreli sentenced to Seven Years ...
 

On the one hand, I laughed, on the other I hope one day we can move past rape jokes being funny.

Re: Martin Shkreli sentenced to Seven Years ...
 

From his figurative rape of aids patients to the literal possibility of being raped in prison. How far the smug have fallen.

Not saying he deserves to be raped, but if there was anyone who I feel little sympathy for having to live in daily fear of being raped, it would be Martin Shkreli.

Re: Martin Shkreli sentenced to Seven Years ...
 

Prison rape is not as common as movies and television and jokes would have you believe, but it does happen, and if it did happen to Mr. Smugface, I wouldn't be surprised.

Re: Martin Shkreli sentenced to Seven Years ...
 

The prices for commissary items for Shkreli will be 5000% above normal.

Re: Martin Shkreli sentenced to Seven Years ...
 

Re: Martin Shkreli sentenced to Seven Years ...
 

Shkreli, who's the smirking, high-profile face of this heinous practice, justifiably got his cowardly ass kicked. However, for a glimpse at how the real pros do it, check out Season 1, Episode 3 of the Netflix series Dirty Money. There you'll hear the tale of Valeant Pharmaceuticals, which under the direction of a slimebucket named Mike Pearson decided the way to make money in the drug business was to buy up smaller pharma companies, thereby acquiring the smaller company's drug patents, shitcan all research and development, vastly jack up the prices on the acquired drugs, and engineer large-scale insurance fraud to pay for it.

Valeant, under a different name, continues to do business even after the scheme collapsed. Pearson, who got booted as CEO in 2016, remains a free man and filed a $30 million+ lawsuit for wrongful termination. No word on how the case ended, as the court in which the case was filed kicked it to arbitration, but it's reasonable to assume Pearson saw a hefty payday.

Re: Martin Shkreli sentenced to Seven Years ...
 

Hoo boy, Valeant. I think our Netflix account is currently paused, but I will have to check that out when next we turn it on. Valeant under Pearson was awful for the corporate raider/LBO stuff, and also got a really bad industry rap for so, so, so many other things. In a perverse way, their activities actually stimulated other areas of pharma because of the exodus of talent that their shit culture caused. Often rather than paying severance, they would just let things get progressively worse until people fled on their own. The smart ones got out early. Lots of good people bailed out of Salix when Valeant came in. Their acquisition/disposition and disposition of Sprout is one of the weirder stitch-ups and unwinds, wherein they acquired Sprout in cash and then turned around and sold it back to its originals owners for the same amount after getting called out for mispricing the only product of competitiveness. It amounted to an interest-free loan in exchange for single-digit royalties.