Jan. 23 (UPI) — A federal appeals court on Tuesday upheld a lifetime ban on Martin Shkreli working in the pharmaceutical industry and ordered him to pay a multimillion-dollar disgorgement fine for illegally hiking drug prices.
The three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled Tuesday that a lower court did not err when it imposed a lifetime ban on the 40-year-old man known by the moniker “Pharma Bro,” upholding the original ruling that found his anti-competitive and illegal scheme to be “egregious, deliberate, repetitive, long-running and ultimately dangerous.”
“Given Shkreli’s pattern of past misconduct, the obvious likelihood of its recurrence and the life-threatening nature of its results, we are persuaded that the district court’s determination as to the proper scope of the injunction was well within its discretion,” the court said in its ruling.
In January 2022, a federal district court found that Shkreli had illegally maintained a monopoly over the drug Daraprim, an anti-parasite medication used to treat HIV patients and others with compromised immune systems, for which his company raised its price by 4,000% from $13.50 a tablet to $750.
As punishment, it imposed a lifetime pharmaceutical ban upon Shkreli and found him liable for $64.4 million in disgorgement.
Shkreli then filed an appeal arguing the district court erred by imposing disgorgement and for banning him from the industry for life, saying the ruling was overly broad and limits his public speech — arguments the appeals court rejected Tuesday.
“The Second Circuit’s decision is a win for consumers seeking affordable, lifesaving medication and clearly demonstrates that corporate executives will be held personally liable for anti-competitive actions that they help orchestrate,” Bureau of Competition Director Henry Liu said in a statement.
Shkreli was sentenced to seven years behind bars after being found guilty of securities fraud in 2017. He was released early in 2022.
