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Thursday, December 24, 2015

All I have to say about Pharma Bro'


From a comment I posted under one of the myriad articles on the hated hedge fund speculator Martin Shkreli.
#SchadenShkreli.

Read the Indictment, 29 page pdf. I have it. Not one word about drug pricing. He’ll eventually be Pleading for some relatively soft time in a Club Fed. Probably have to spend some of whatever money he has left for one of those "Successfully-Coping-With-Your-White-Collar-Prison-Time" consultants. Whatever this sorry episode tangentially, inferentially “says” about the  corrupt Pharma world is utterly beside the point. This kid is just an arrogant boiler room grifter, a poseur Master-of-the-Universe Madoff wannabee (and a laughable repeat failure at that) who’d have tried to pull the same crap with companies in other business lines were he focused on them.

Beyond the indictment specs, read up on his KaloBios CusterFluck. Boy, THAT was a short CEO & Board Chair hostile takeover tenure (all of about 5 weeks).

Don’t hold your breath for a Michael Lewis book and movie about this loser (It would have to be titled "The Femto Short"). He won’t even merit a Vanity Fair article.
Shkreli, proudly wearing his Bad Boy arrogance on his sleeve, had dismissively claimed that his raising of the price of Daraprim by some 5,000% after he'd acquired the distribution rights was necessary to provide R&D funding for new lifesaving drugs in his Turing Pharmaceuticals company. So, his first big move thereafter? A hostile takeover of the moribund Bay Area KaloBios Pharmaceuticals, whereupon he had himself installed as CEO and Board Chairman.

KaloBios' most valuable asset? Not a lifesaving drug, not scientific staff expertise, but a fungible FDA regulatory waiver that could be sold to the highest bidder.

Given that he acquired KaloBios using OPM (Other Peoples' Money), he will surely be spending many years at the Defendant's tables in civil courts in addition to his criminal problem, now that this investment is in the toilet (KB stock has again cratered and NASDAQ has delisted them after having halted KB trading). His lengthy track record of losing OPM (since his very first hedge fund initiative) will do more to permanently ostracize him among the investment community than any of his juvie social media antics.


Hope it was fun while it lasted, son.
_________

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