Notorious ex-pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli is in trouble again with the Federal Trade Commission, which announced today that the convicted fraudster has failed to cooperate with the commission’s investigation into whether he violated his lifetime ban from the pharmaceutical industry last year. starting a company called “Druglike, Inc.”
In a lawsuit today, the FTC asked a New York federal judge to hold Shkreli in contempt for failing to provide the requested documents to the FTC and to make himself available for an interview. Under the 2022 court order barring him for life from involvement in the pharmaceutical industry, Shkreli is required to provide such information to the FTC, the commission noted.
“The fact that Martin Shkreli has not complied with the court’s order demonstrates a clear disregard for the law,” Holly Vedova, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition, said in a press release. “The FTC will not hesitate to use the full scope of its authorities to facilitate a comprehensive investigation of potential wrongdoing.”
At the heart of the dispute is whether Shkreli’s Druglike co-founder is in violation of his lifetime ban from the pharmaceutical industry, which was in response to Shkreli’s infamous move to raise the price of the cheap, life-saving antiparasitic drug Daraprim. , from $17.50 per pill to $750 per pill in 2015. In the January 2022 court ruling banning him from the industry, U.S. District Judge Denise Cote wrote:
Banning an individual from an entire industry and restricting his future ability to make a living in that field is a serious remedy and should be done with care and only if equity requires it. Shkreli’s blatant, deliberate, repetitive, long-running, and ultimately dangerous illegal behavior justifies the imposition of a court order of this magnitude.
The order prohibits Shkreli from “participating in the pharmaceutical industry in any capacity”.
Still, Shkreli’s new company seems squarely in the realm of the pharmaceutical industry. In a press release last year, the company said it would “revolutionize” early stage drug discovery with a decentralized computer network “powered by Web3 technology.” It was generally touted that the company’s web-based suite enabled drug developers to handle the development tasks of “target identification, drug design, and tools for both building and running large-scale virtual screening workflows.”
Shkreli is quoted in the press release as saying that users “may be responsible and rewarded for discovering the next breakthrough drug” and that the technology will “disrupt the economics of the drug trade” and compete with “pharmaceutical giants”.
The FTC said in its announcement today that it initially sought information about the new company and its compliance with its October lifetime suspension, but that Shkreli ignored the agency’s “repeated requests.” In addition to asking the court to find Shkreli contemptuous, the FTC has also asked that Shkreli be ordered to comply with the FTC’s investigation within 21 days of the court’s decision.
The FTC also noted in its lawsuit that Shkreli has so far not paid any of the $64.6 million he was charged in addition to his lifetime suspension.
