SCOTUS denial ends saga of Shkreli’s infamous 5,000% drug price scheme

The legal saga over Martin Shkreli's infamous 5,000 percent price hike of a life-saving anti-parasitic drug has ended with a flat denial from the highest court in the land. On Monday, the Supreme Court rejected Shkreli's petition to appeal an order to return $64.6 million in profits from the pricing scheme of Daraprim, a decades-old drug used to treat toxoplasmosis. The condition is caused by a single-celled parasite that can be deadly for newborns and people with compromised immune systems, such as people who have HIV, cancer, or an organ transplant. Federal prosecutors successfully argued in courts that Shkreli orchestrated an illegal anticompetitive scheme that allowed him to dramatically raise the price of Daraprim overnight. When Shkreli and his pharmaceutical company, Vyera (formerly Turing), bought the rights to the drug in 2015, the price of a single pill jumped to $750 after being priced between $13.50 and $17.50 earlier that year. And Shkreli quickly came to epitomize callous greed in the pharmaceutical industry. In a lawsuit filed in 2021, the Federal Trade Commission and seven state attorneys general accused Shkreli of building a "web of anticompetitive restrictions to box out the competition." In January of 2022, US District Court Judge Denise Cote agreed, finding that Shkreli's conduct was "egregious, deliberate, repetitive, long-running, and ultimately dangerous." Cotes banned Shkreli from the pharmaceutical industry for life and found him liable for $64.6 million in disgorgement. In January 2024, an appeals court upheld Cote's ruling. Months later, Shkreli's lawyer filed a petition with the Supreme Court arguing that the ill-gotten profits from Daraprim's price hike went to corporate entities, not Shkreli personally, and that federal courts had issued conflicting rulings on disgorgement liabilities. In a list of orders today, the Supreme Court announced it denied Shkreli's petition to hear his appeal. The justices offered no explanation and no dissents were noted. The denial is Shkreli's second rejection from the Supreme Court. He also petitioned the high court to hear an appeal of his 2017 fraud conviction. In that case, federal prosecutors accused Shkreli of running a Ponzi-like scheme between 2009 and 2014, which involved defrauding investors of two hedge funds he managed and siphoning millions from his earlier pharmaceutical company, Retrophin. With that conviction, Shkreli was sentenced to seven years in prison and ordered to forfeit $7.36 million in assets, including the sole copy of the Wu-Tang album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, which Shkreli had purchased for $2 million. As Ars reported in August, Shkreli made many copies of the album before the government's seizure, spurring yet more legal troubles.