Martin Shkreli Ousted As CEO From Another Drug Company

Four days after his arrest on fraud charges, Martin Shkreli received his second pink slip, this time from KaloBios Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: KBIO), a struggling drug maker that Shkreli took over last month.

Last week, Shkreli was removed as chief executive of Turing Pharmaceuticals, a privately held company in NY that he co-founded late a year ago.

KaloBios, a publicly traded company was in big financial troubles prior to Mr. Shkreli’s involvement.

As well as losing his role at KaloBios, Mr Shkreli resigned his role as chief executive at Turing on Friday.

KaloBios also announced today that Tony Chase, who joined the board along with Shkreli back in November, has also resigned. Trading in KaloBios shares was halted that day and has yet to resume.

In a Wall Street Journal article published Monday, Shkreli said the authorities had targeted him because of his drug price increases.

The debts allegedly were owed to investors defrauded in two now-defunct Shkreli hedge funds that focused on health care investments: MSMB Capital and MSMB Healthcare. A spokesperson for Turing Pharmaceuticals confirmed that the account was hacked to Reuters and said “We have been working with Twitter to get it fixed”.

It’s the third time the troubled CEO has had to vacate a company’s top spot in a little more than a year.

Shkreli lost control of his Twitter account to hackers on Sunday, hours after he took to the microblogging service to plead his innocence, said his spokesman, Craig Stevens.

Shkreli initially gained widespread notoriety after his company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, made a decision to hike the costs of one of its drugs, which is used to treat parasitic infections in people, like HIV patients, with compromised immune systems, from $13.50 to $700 per pill overnight.

“‘Trying to find anything we could to stop him’ was the attitude of the government”, Shkreli said during the interview, in which he was accompanied by his lawyers.

Martin Shkreli, the entrepreneur charged by federal prosecutors in Brooklyn with securities fraud, is speaking out about the allegations against him. “It seemed to me like it would be fun to experiment with”, Shkreli said in the interview.