Martin Shkreli Resigns As Turing Pharmaceutical CEO

Infamous Turing Pharmaceuticals AG CEO Martin Shkreli resigned from his post on Friday, a day after being indicted on securities fraud charges, and will be replaced for the time being by company Chairman Ron Tilles.

The charges against Shkreli, 32, center on his behavior at several ventures he founded before he founded Turing: two hedge funds, and a biopharmaceutical company that filed a lawsuit against him this summer.

The 62-year-old drug is the only approved treatment for toxoplasmosis, a rare parasitic disease that mainly strikes pregnant women, cancer patients and AIDS patients.

In one case, Retrophin raised the price of Thiola, which is used to treat a disease that causes kidney stones, from $1.50 a pill to $30. Shkreli founded the company early in 2011 and was sued by Retrophin and fired last fall after his alleged misappropriations were revealed.

The voicemail inbox of a company executive was full…

He was charged with securities fraud, securities fraud conspiracy and wire fraud conspiracy, with a maximum sentence for the top count of 20 years in prison.

Thursday afternoon, Shkreli entered a not-guilty plea and was released on a $5 million bond. “Thanks for the support”. That move drew the opprobrium of Congress, doctors and presidential candidates.

Amid a deluge of criticism from patients and politicians, Shkreli pledged to lower Daraprim’s price, but later reneged and instead offered hospitals a 50 percent discount – still amounting to a 2,500 percent increase. Headlines called the Brooklyn-born Shkreli such things as “America’s most hated man”, the “drug industry’s villain” and “biotech’s bad boy” – and those were just some of the more printable names.

Pharmaceutical companies have often blamed price hikes on ever-increasing research and development costs.

News of his detainment sparked speculation that the coveted Wu-Tang Clan album had ended up in the hands of the authorities, but Federal Bureau of Investigation chiefs have now confirmed they did not seize the record when they arrested Shkreli. “And my investors expect me to maximize profits, not to minimize them or go half or go 70 percent but to go to 100 percent of the profit curve”.

Last month, Shkreli acquired a majority stake in publicly traded drugmaker KaloBios Pharmaceuticals Inc. and became CEO of that company too. After his arrest, its stock fell by more than half Thursday before trading in the company was suspended.