New York, FTC sue 'pharma bro' Shkreli, others over Daraprim price hikes

Martin Shkreli, the “pharma bro” in prison for defrauding investors, faces a lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission and New York Attorney General’s office for a scheme to preserve his monopoly for the drug Daraprim, which has seen gigantic price increases. The lawsuit accuses a company that Shkreli once ran of buying the rights to Daraprim, which is used to treat toxoplasmosis, and quickly raising the price from $17.50 per tablet to $750 while also taking steps to ensure that there would not be a generic version of the medicine. The company named is Vyera Pharmaceuticals, formerly Turing Pharmaceuticals, which was headed by Shkreli.

For example, the FTC alleges that the company restricted distribution of the medicine to ensure that generic drug makers could not get the samples that they would need to make their own version of the drug. The company also prevented potential competitors from buying one of the ingredients needed for the medicine, the FTC said. A spokeswoman for Vyera and a lawyer for Shkreli did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Shkreli became notorious as “Pharma Bro” when he raised the price of the anti-parasitic drug Daraprim by more than 5,000% in 2015 as chief executive of Turing Pharmaceuticals. The U.S. Supreme Court said in November that Shkreli must remain in prison, rejecting his effort to overturn his conviction and seven-year sentence for securities fraud and conspiracy.

The justices refused to hear Shkreli’s appeal of his August 2017 conviction and $7.36 million forfeiture for cheating investors in two hedge funds he founded, and trying to prop up the stock price of biotechnology company Retrophin Inc, which he once ran.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-drugs-shkreli-ftc-ny/new-york-ftc-sue-pharma-bro-shkreli-others-over-daraprim-price-hikes-idUSKBN1ZQ2D8

"Buybacks Secured": Boeing Obtains $12 Billion Financing From Over Dozen Banks

For all the flawed, cost-gutted and, on at least two occasions, deadly engineering of the 737 MAX which has indefinitely grounded the seemingly doomed plane, what investors and traders were much more concerned about was whether the company that had repurchased over $100 billion in stock in the past decade….. would keep the Kool-Aid coming and its stock price if not rising then at least above $300, especially with Boeing's total debt ballooning, and its free cash flow crashing just as fast as its badly designed airplanes.

Those investors got an answer, if only a short-term one, when moments ago CNBC's Leslie Josephs reported that Boeing has secured more than $12 billion in financing from more than a dozen banks "as the industrial giant shores up its balance sheet."

Last week, CNBC first reported that the US aerospace and military giant was trying to secure a loan of at least $10 billion, with the final size of the loan, some $2 billion more than originally sought, said to be "a vote of confidence" in the manufacturer from Wall Street, according to CNBC.

That's one way to look at it - another is that Boeing will promptly turn around and engage in even more financial engineering, using the proceeds from the delayed-draw loan to repurchase Boeing stock currently held by its "generous" Wall Street lenders who will not only get their money back from the company, but will find themselves far, far higher in the capital structure, priming virtually every asset below them with a new secured loan ahead of taking control of the company should a worst case scenario happen, and Boeing is forced to file Chapter 11.

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/buybacks-secured-boeing-obtains-12-billion-financing-over-dozen-banks

>>7932854

no problem with that anon-wud too. it's the buybacks and debt… that is the huge issue.