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Martin Shkreli has been sentenced to seven years in prison

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Re: Martin Shkreli has been sentenced to seven years in prison

#241

Post by ImSkeptical »

danso wrote: post #171
toomuchtodo wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One banker did. For 30 months. I think Shkreli was obnoxious and crude; the sentencing should've aligned with the crime. But America, so vengeance porn. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/04/magazine/only-one-top-ban...

He was also obnoxious and crude in a manner that made it near impossible for the judge to be generous in mitigating his sentence with regards to acceptance of responsibility. He couldn't even wait for an hour after being convicted before going on YouTube and bragging about how he thought he wouldn't face any prison time: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/martin-shkrelis-lawyers-fa...

How dare he post on YouTube! 7 years in jail!

This is clearly giving an unpopular person an unnecessarily harsh penalty. This is a corruption of justice.

Re: Martin Shkreli has been sentenced to seven years in prison

#243

Post by nate_meurer »

brucephillips wrote: post #182
king_magic wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I initially did not agree with you, then re-read your posts several time, and have come to the conclusion you are absolutely right. Cornering a drug and hiking the price simply for profit and no other legitimate reason (supply chain issue, newer/more effective version, etc...) should be illegal. It is a crime, maybe not in the letter of the law, but ethically, it's a crime.

> Cornering a drug and hiking the price simply for profit and no other legitimate reason (supply chain issue, newer/more effective version, etc...) should be illegal. This is how all patents work. Are you against patents?

Daraprim is not patented.

Re: Martin Shkreli has been sentenced to seven years in prison

#244

Post by throwaway84742 »

MaybiusStrip wrote: post #192
throwaway84742 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He didn’t “extort sick poor people”, he extorted insurance companies. If you couldn’t afford his drugs, he was offering them for free.

You do realize that insurance companies have to charge people more money than they spend in order to be profitable, right? Exorbitant drug costs is just another one of the factors that price poor people out of insurance, which is actually a much worse outcome than simply denying access to that specific drug.

The drug he was selling is used to treat a pretty rare disease, so it made little to no effect on the overall cost of insurance. And even at a higher price it was a good deal to insurance companies who would have to spend massively more if this drug wasn’t available at all.

Re: Martin Shkreli has been sentenced to seven years in prison

#245

Post by ryanlol »

s73v3r_ wrote: post #206
Clubber wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but that's not the point. The point is the US government has many ways of throwing people in jail it doesn't like, including me or you. That's doesn't equate with a free society.

Neither does being perfectly free to defraud investors.

Did anyone actually suggest that anywhere here?

Re: Martin Shkreli has been sentenced to seven years in prison

#246

Post by stale2002 »

walshemj wrote: post #168
hb3b wrote: post #14

Cruel and unusual given the crime. Half the sentence of Jeffrey Skilling who destroyed thousands of families. No question in my mind that the judge had it out for him from the get-go.

Yes going "fuck you judge" whilst on trial does tend to have that effect. Its also why contempt of court and malfeasance in public office has such harsh panties

Are judges Kings now and if we hurt their ity bity feelings, they will send men with guns to arrest us for it?

This is exactly the same thing as when Kings used to kill people because they insulted their honor or something.

Re: Martin Shkreli has been sentenced to seven years in prison

#247

Post by where_do_i_live »

Clubber wrote: post #120
where_do_i_live wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3. .. tripled their money haha no... he LOST their money (All of it), LIED about it (fraud), and paid them back with OTHER funds. Get the facts right first. Misstated - information, the only misstatements are in your post.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-crime-shkreli/investo... (Reuters) - One of the investors former drug company executive Martin Shkreli is accused of defrauding testified on Wednesday that Shkreli lied to him repeatedly, although he eventually made millions of dollars from the investment. This was apparently the guy who alerted investigators to the fraud. He made millions.

I make no claim that they were not paid back and in excess of their initial investment (which was not in pharmaceuticals)

If I lose your money, lie to you, but then I give you 10X your money because I had that in a bank account somewhere because I won the lottery doesn't mean that I didn't commit fraud in relation to your original investment.

Just because your "investment" was repaid at a greater amount doesn't mean you weren't defrauded. He made money because of a settlement, NOT because the investment was in pharma. From your own source article:

...largely through an agreement in which Shkreli gave him shares in his drug company Retrophin Inc.

Shkreli committed fraud, got caught, investors realized they were defrauded, Shkreli then settled privately and paid them above their initial investments with funds completely unrelated to their investments.

He made millions because Shkreli got lucky and was able to settle with them privately. That does not absolve him from the criminal actions he committed just because he settled the civil cases. If Shkreli didn't get lucky with his pharma scheme those investors would not get paid back because their original investment funds were all gone long ago, and again, were not involved in the pharma scheme.

You seem to lack the understanding of the facts in this case.

Re: Martin Shkreli has been sentenced to seven years in prison

#248

Post by toomuchtodo »

rayiner wrote: post #231
theo775 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The financiers causing the financial collapse did not." They weren't prosecuted. That doesn't mean they didn't break the law.

Likewise, just because they caused the financial collapse doesn't mean they broke the law.

CDO (Collateralized Debt Obligation) origination fraud is a crime. The GFC was not caused by law abiding activities. It was fraud, plain and simple.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/bank-america-pay-1665-billion...

As part of the RMBS Working Group, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey conducted a FIRREA investigation into misrepresentations made by Merrill Lynch to investors in 72 RMBS throughout 2006 and 2007. As the statement of facts describes, Merrill Lynch regularly told investors the loans it was securitizing were made to borrowers who were likely and able to repay their debts. Merrill Lynch made these representations even though it knew, based on the due diligence it had performed on samples of the loans, that a significant number of those loans had material underwriting and compliance defects - including as many as 55 percent in a single pool. In addition, Merrill Lynch rarely reviewed the unsampled loans to ensure that the defects observed in the samples were not present throughout the remainder of the pools. Merrill Lynch also disregarded its own due diligence and securitized loans that the due diligence vendors had identified as defective. This practice led one Merrill Lynch consultant to “wonder why we have due diligence performed” if Merrill Lynch was going to securitize the loans “regardless of issues.”

Disclaimer: I was privy to this having known several mortgage underwriters who identified this fraud, and despite reporting it with extensive documentation (which I personally collated and delivered via FedEx) to the SEC, DOJ, and OCC, were ignored.

Re: Martin Shkreli has been sentenced to seven years in prison

#249

Post by [deleted] »

skookumchuck wrote: post #151
frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I push my wife off a cliff for life insurance but she falls onto and kills a terrorist or school shooter does that lessen my crime? Does it even change the nature of my crime? No so it shouldn't enter in.

Judges take into account the "impact" of the crime all the time in sentencing. As they should. In this case, his crime had no negative impact on anyone, and the unduly harsh sentence sure looks like a sentence for the unlikable (but perfectly legal) price hikes he did.

[deleted]

Re: Martin Shkreli has been sentenced to seven years in prison

#250

Post by Florin_Andrei »

rayiner wrote: post #225
Florin_Andrei wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the outrage was ever about Shkreli not saving someone's life. It was about Shkreli making lots of money from people's suffering, after artificially inflating the price of a drug that he controlled. In other words, getting rich from increasing the amount of misery in this world.

> In other words, getting rich from increasing the amount of misery in this world. This is the fallacy. He didn't get rich from increasing the amount of misery in the world . He didn't give people toxoplasmosis. He got rich from not doing something he could do ( i.e. sell drugs more cheaply) to decrease the amount of misery. Which is the exact same thing you do when you buy a Macbook Pro instead of donating the money…

Making it harder for patients to get treatment definitely increases the amount of misery in the world. You don't have to be the toxoplasma gondii parasite to make life miserable for a lot of people. It's enough if you're the other kind of parasite who makes the treatment orders of magnitude more expensive, just for personal gain.

> fallacy

ROTFL - this is like talking about cherries with someone who can's see the color red.

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