Pharma-Douche Martin Shkreli Arrested By The FBI

Martin Shkreli being taken away in handcuffs

Few individuals personify the epitome of vulture capitalism and pharmaceutical company greed more than Martin Shkreli, a former hedge fund operator and douche bag who purchased a pharmaceutical company and then promptly raised the price of a drug used to treat infections that can be devastating for babies and those with AIDS from $13.50 a pill to $750 a pill.  Today, the lime ball and arrogant bastard (who seems to have studied the art under Donald Trump) got his just deserves and was arrested by the FBI on securities fraud and wire fraud charges.  The New York Times has details.  Here are highlights:

It has been a busy week for Martin Shkreli, the flamboyant businessman at the center of the drug industry’s price-gouging scandals.

He said he would sharply increase the cost of a drug used to treat a potentially deadly parasitic infection. He called himself “the world’s most eligible bachelor” on Twitter and railed against critics in a live-streaming YouTube video.

Then, at 6 a.m. Thursday morning, federal authorities arrested Mr. Shkreli, 32, at his Murray Hill apartment. He was arraigned in Federal District Court in Brooklyn on securities fraud and wire fraud charges.

Mr. Shkreli has emerged as a symbol of pharmaceutical greed for acquiring a decades-old drug used to treat an infection that can be devastating for babies and people with AIDS and, overnight, raised the price to $750 a pill from $13.50. His only mistake, he later conceded, was not raising the price more.

Those price increases combined with Mr. Shkreli’s jeering response has made him a lightning rod for public outrage and fodder for the presidential campaign. His company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, and others, like Valeant Pharmaceuticals, have come under fire from lawmakers and consumers for profiting from steep price increases for old drugs.

But the criminal charges brought against him actually relate to something else entirely — his time as a hedge fund manager and when he ran his first biopharmaceutical company, Retrophin. Federal officials described his crimes as a quasi-Ponzi scheme in which he used money from his company to pay off money-losing investors in his hedge funds. An F.B.I. official called his business schemes a “securities fraud trifecta of lies, deceit and greed.”

Still, for many of his critics, Mr. Shkreli’s arrest was a comeuppance for the brash, irreverent executive who has seemed to enjoy — relish, even — his public notoriety.

“Personally, I think Martin Shkreli has become wealthy at the expense of the public good. I don’t believe for a second that his manipulation of drug prices fuels valuable research as he has claimed,” said Katie Uva, a 2006 alumni of Hunter College High School in Manhattan where Mr. Shkreli attended, in an email response to questions. This fall, Ms. Uva started an online fund-raising campaign to match a $1 million donation from Mr. Shkreli to Hunter in the hope of persuading the school to return the donation.

MSMB’s performance wasn’t nearly as hot as Mr. Shkreli let on. From 2009 through 2012, Mr. Shkreli lost millions of dollars trading in the market, according to the accusations contained in the indictment. But he hid those losses, telling investors instead that the funds had strong double-digit returns.

In 2011, Mr. Shkreli started Retrophin, which quickly adopted a controversial business strategy, acquiring old, neglected drugs used for rare diseases and quickly raising their prices.

Soon, however, Mr. Shkreli was embarking on a plan to use Retrophin assets to pay off MSMB investors. . . . When seven MSMB investors threatened to sue in 2013, Mr. Shkreli and Evan Greebel, the lead outside counsel for Retrophin, used $3.4 million in Retrophin funds and stock to settle the investors’ claims, even though Retrophin had no responsibility, the indictment says.

[W]hen Retrophin’s auditor raised questions about the settlements, Mr. Shkreli and Mr. Greebel created fraudulent consulting agreements for the investors, thinking they could pay the money back without upsetting the auditor, the indictment states. From September 2013 to March 2014, they created fake consulting agreements for four investors, paying $7.6 million in cash and stock. Retrophin’s board did not approve of the consulting agreements, the indictment says.

In September 2014, Retrophin ousted Mr. Shkreli as its chief executive. A lawsuit filed this summer by the company mirrors many of the same accusations contained in the federal charges.

There is more, but the take away is that this guy is disgusting.  I hope he gets convicted and ends up being someone's bitch in prison.  It would be all too sweet of a divine justice.  Of course, if you believe Ben Carson's lunatic theories, Shkreli will be gay when he gets out of prison.

Grand Jury Indicts Anti-Gay GOP Texas Attorney General, Ken Paxton

Anti-gay bigot indicted

I lived in Texas many years ago and, like Alabama where I also once lived, the state seems to have gone insane finds itself under the heel of anti-gay (and anti-minority) extremists in the Republican Party. And not only are these Republicans crazy anti-gay and virulently, they are also corrupt.  Take Texas Attorney General, Ken Paxton who has been indicted on multiple counts of securities fraud.  One has to wonder when the modern cities in Texas will have the ability to out vote the lunatics in the rural areas as is now beginning to occur regularly in Virginia.  Here are highlights from the New York Times on Paxton's indictment:

Ken Paxton, the Republican attorney general of Texas and a former state legislator, has been indicted by a grand jury on charges of securities fraud and of failing to register with the state securities board, officials said.

The grand jury in the northern Dallas suburb of McKinney handed up a three-count indictment against Mr. Paxton on Tuesday, the officials said. The indictment is to be unsealed on Monday, when Mr. Paxton is expected to turn himself in to the authorities at the Collin County Jail.

The charges — two counts of first-degree securities fraud and one count of third-degree failure to register — are tied to Mr. Paxton’s work soliciting clients and investors for two companies while he was a member of the Texas House of Representatives, before he was elected attorney general in November.

In the most serious charges, first-degree securities fraud, Mr. Paxton is accused of misleading investors in a technology company, Servergy Inc., which is based in McKinney, his hometown. He is accused of encouraging the investors in 2011 to put more than $600,000 into Servergy while failing to tell them he was making a commission on their investment, and misrepresenting himself as an investor in the company, said Kent A. Schaffer, one of the two special prosecutors handling the case.

Mr. Schaffer said politics had played no part in the indictment.  “I have nothing personal against Mr. Paxton based on his politics,” he said. “Even if you found fault with Brian Wice or myself, how do you find it with the Texas Rangers? These are the most honest, straightforward, incorruptible police officers you’re ever going to find. They don’t have political motivations, and they certainly wouldn’t have any against the sitting attorney general.”

A conviction for a first-degree felony in Texas can carry a punishment of life in prison or a sentence of five to 99 years. A third-degree felony is punishable with a sentence of two to 10 years. Mr. Paxton helped create the possibility of such severe punishment: As a freshman representative in the Texas House in May 2003, he voted to amend the state securities law to make it a felony to act as an investment adviser representative without being registered, the very crime the grand jury accuses him of committing.

As the state’s top lawyer and law enforcement officer, Mr. Paxton has made headlines for challenging the Obama administration on its immigration and environmental policies and for encouraging county clerks to refuse to issue marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples on religious grounds after the Supreme Court’s ruling upholding same-sex marriage.

Servergy has also been the subject of an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The investigation centered on whether Servergy and its founder, Bill Mapp, who has since resigned as chief executive, made misleading statements about the company to induce investors to buy Servergy stock, according to court documents the S.E.C. filed. Mr. Paxton’s name and email address appeared in documents Servergy filed to comply with S.E.C. subpoenas.

Anti-Gay Texas Attorney General Faces Possible Felony Indictment

With Texas Republicans there seems to be a contest as to who can be the most anti-gay - - and the most corrupt.  Former Governor Rick Perry is already facing serious allegations and now Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton who has encouraged rogue clerks to refuse to issue marriage licenses to same couples is facing possible  felony charges for securities fraud.  Not surprisingly, Paxton is a darling of the lunatic Tea Party and Christofascists who hold sway in the Texas GOP.  The Raw Story looks at yet another possible corrupt Republican in Texas.  Here are highlights:

Special prosecutors will ask a Texas grand jury as early as this month to indict the state’s attorney general on first-degree felony charges for suspected securities laws violations, one of the prosecutors said on Thursday.

A spokesman for Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican who came to office earlier this year with strong Tea Party support, was not immediately available for comment.

“There is evidence that needs to be presented to the grand jury about a couple of different violations. One of which that they will have to determine is if securities fraud was present,” said attorney Kent Schaffer, appointed to investigate the suspected violations.

Paxton drew national attention recently when he said county clerks in Texas who object to gay marriage on religious grounds can refuse to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples despite last week’s landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling requiring states to allow same-sex marriage.

When Paxton was in the legislature, he was hired to seek clients by an investment firm called Mowery Capital Management, which is facing allegations from the State Securities Board of defrauding investors.

The Texas State Securities Board in May 2014 found that Paxton was not properly registered as an investment advisor in his work with the firm. It reprimanded him and fined him $1,000.

The special prosecutors, appointed earlier this year, have been looking into possible criminal violations stemming from Paxton’s role with the firm and his failure to properly register as an advisor.

A first-degree felony conviction in Texas can result in 5 to 99 years in prison.

New Jersey: SPLC Attorney Destroys Head Of "Ex-Gay Ministry"

ex-felon and municipal-bond fraud scheme mastermind Arthur Goldberg

The consumer fraud trial in New Jersey against JONAH - Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing - which fraudulently claimed that it could "cure" gays and make them heterosexual continues and, thankfully, continues to show the types of charlatans behind so many of these bogus ministries.  The irony is that even as the trial progresses, many Christofascists and right wing churches are launching new efforts to sell these snake oil peddling "ministries" to the ignorant and uninformed.  Among other things, at trial it came out that the founder of JONAH, Arthur Goldberg - which Wayne Besen and discovered a number of years ago - is a convicted felon.  Moreover, he lacks any of the credentials that he claims to hold in JONAH literature.  The New Jersey Jewish News has details:

On the trial’s second day, the plaintiffs’ lawyer Lina Bensman pointed out that Goldberg was a disbarred attorney who in 1989 was incarcerated for six months on federal tax fraud and conspiracy charges while heading a New York underwriting firm.

She asked why he had occasionally identified himself as a “doctor,” although he was not a physician and had no PhD.  “I am a JD, a juris doctor,” he explained. 

Goldberg also acknowledged that he used the title “rabbi” on occasion, although he was not ordained.

“I was not a rabbi,” he said. “I have no formal religious training other than going to a yeshiva in grade school.”

Goldberg also testified, “I have never been a licensed counselor. I give advice.”  But after being shown a signed document projected on a video screen, Goldberg acknowledged he had applied to the American Psychotherapy Association to become a certified relationship specialist and a certified professional counselor.   “But these certifications were revoked?” asked Bensman.  “Yes, ma’am” he replied. 

“And the certifications read, ‘I certify I have not been convicted of a felony’?”  “That is correct,” he said.

The article also notes:

According to Bennett Zurofsky, a Newark attorney who handles employment, consumer fraud, and constitutional rights cases, the allegations against JONAH “are similar to all fraud cases in that representations were made that people would rely on in making the decision to make use of the product or service, and that the representations were false and you were injured as a result of their being false.”

Zurofsky said the New Jersey fraud statute is stronger than those in many other states because it permits winning plaintiffs to collect triple damages — three times the amount of the money they spent on the service. In addition, the losing party is required to pay the attorneys’ fees of the winning side.

“What makes the consumer fraud statute useful is if you bring it as an ordinary fraud case you have to pay your own attorney,” he said. “A case like this one can be very expensive to litigate.”

Obviously, if JONAH loses this case, it could be shut down permanently.  Sadly, in states with less  stringent consumer fraud statutes, these quack ministries may be able to dodge much needed litigation.   FYI - Equality Case Files is attending the trial and is posting transcripts of the court proceedings and testimony. JONAH is being defended by a legal group headed by anti-gay extremist and fat cow Maggie Gallagher.

Again what JONAH has in common with so many of these fraudulent "ministries" is that fact that  most of the "experts" are frauds and/or have no legitimate credentials.