Yahoo Finance Drug Tycoon Martin Shkreli Arrested By FBI
Pharmaceutical entrepreneur Martin Shkreli - who hiked the price of a life-saving drug by 5,000% - has been arrested by the FBI.
The 32-year-old was held at an apartment block in midtown Manhattan (Hamburg: 32U.HM - news) by agents who escorted him to a waiting car.
In a Thursday news conference, prosecutors said Shkreli "essentially ran his companies like a ponzi scheme".
The investigation is linked to his time as manager of hedge fund MSMB Capital Management and chief executive of biopharmaceutical company Retrophin (NasdaqGM: RTRX - news) .
The Reuters news agency says he is due to be charged with illegally using Retrophin assets to pay off debts after MSMB lost millions of dollars.
Shkreli gained notoriety in September when his startup company bought the right to a life-saving drug and then hiked the price of it by 5,000%.
Daraprim is a 62-year-old drug mainly used to treat people who have toxoplasmosis, a potentially deadly parasitic infection.
The arrest is unrelated to the drug pricing row or his current companies Turing Pharmaceuticals and KalaBios.
However, shares of KaloBios fell by around half in premarket trading.
Shkreli was in the news again earlier this month when it emerged that he had purchased a single copy of a one-off Wu-Tang Clan album for $2m (£1.3m).
The group created just one copy of its album Once Upon A Time In Shaolin, and said it would be sold to the highest bidder.
The 31-track album comes in a hand-carved box, accompanied by a leather-bound book with 174 pages of parchment paper filled with lyrics and background on the songs (Other OTC: UBGXF - news) .
