Former pharmaceutical CEO Martin Shkreli was sentenced to seven years in prison on Friday for federal fraud charges.
Shkreli will spend 84 months in prison after being found guilty last year for defrauding investors in a hedge fund and biotech firm.
The former pharma executive’s attorney, Benjamin Brafman, had asked for a sentence of 18 months, while prosecutors sought a sentence of 15 years.
Shkreli, 34, at times cried during the proceedings and said he was sorry for losing the trust of his investors. The contrition is a stark contrast to his boasting on social media that the original verdict was a sham because he had made money for his investors.
The court also ordered him to pay a fine of $75,000. The court previously ordered him to pay nearly $7.4 million and give up the lone copy of an infamous Wu-Tang Clan album that Shkreli bought for $2 million.
Shkreli gained notoriety separately when his company Turing Pharmaceuticals raised the price of the anti-malarial drug Daraprim from $13.50 a pill to $750.
The practically overnight price hike, coupled with Shkreli’s flippant response to media reports of the increase, earning him his “pharma bro” moniker, outraged the public and members of Congress.
Shkreli made a memorable appearance before the House Oversight Committee in February 2016. He took no questions and pleaded the Fifth Amendment, but smirked as lawmakers castigated him for the price increase.
Shkreli later tweeted that the lawmakers were “imbeciles.”
Shkreli was found guilty of fraud in August 2017 for a scheme in which he defrauded investors in another pharmaceutical company called Retrophin. He was also convicted of defrauding investors in two hedge funds he ran.
Shkreli resigned as Turing’s CEO after he was charged in December 2015 with securities and wire fraud.
He was imprisoned in September in a Brooklyn jail because he asked social media followers to bring him a lock of Hillary Clinton’s hair.
Judge Kiyo Matsumoto routinely referred to Shkreli’s social media antics when rendering the sentence, including that “Shkreli threatened to make a family including four young kids homeless,” according to a tweet from WCBS Reporter Ethan Harp.
Congress took action to try to prevent future moves that Shkreli used to drastically raise the price of Daraprim.
The drug is off patent and has been used for decades. However, it has no competition because only about 10,000 patients use it.
That left an opening for Turing to buy the rights to the drug and quickly jack up the price. Another obstacle was a slow and expensive process for getting a generic approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
Congress passed legislation in 2017 that gives the FDA authority to quickly approve a generic copy of an off-patent drug that has experienced a massive price spike.
