“Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli, during a surprise visit with reporters covering his fraud trial Friday, criticized the people prosecuting him as the “junior varsity,” claimed he never considered taking a plea deal and said people “blame me for everything.”
Shkreli also griped about news headlines about the case, and teed off on a young woman who testified about his dragging out paying her out a $435,000 investment in his hedge funds for almost a year, saying she wasn’t a “victim.”
And Shrkreli said that several documents mentioned during the trial so far, which have raised questions about his conduct with investors, were prepared by other people.
“Do I want to exonerate myself?” Shkreli asked a small group of journalists when asked if he had wanted to have his day in court.
“Yes.”
He only stopped talking and left the room when his high-powered lawyer, Benjamin Brafman, looked into the room, and asked him, “Martin, can I talk to you for a minute?”
Shkreli’s unexpected remarks came during the lunch break of his securities fraud trial in Brooklyn, NY, federal court. He is charged with looting millions of out his publicly traded drug company Retrophin to repay investors he allegedly defrauded at two hedge funds he previously ran.
Shkreli walked down to a courtroom at the other end of the same floor where his trial is being held, and began talking to several reporters, who were in the room to monitor a video and audio feed of the trial set up for people who don’t have seats in the main courtroom.
“Welcome,” one reporter told Shkreli.
The 34-year former pharmaceuticals executive then began talking freely, mentioning that a friend of his had come into the so-called “overflow” room earlier in the week and tried to sit on the judge’s bench.
When a reporter asked Shkreli how he thought opening arguments on Wednesday had gone, he shot back, “How do you think they went?”
Shkreli suggested his lawyer Brafman had far outclassed assistant United States Attorney G. Karthik Srinivasan.
Shkreli several times noted that Srinivasan joined the prosecutor’s office in the Eastern District of New York just two years ago after leaving a job at a Manhattan law firm, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind.
When a CNBC reporter pointed out that the Eastern District is a well-regarded prosecutor’s office, which had recently been led by Loretta Lynch, who was Attorney General of the United States until January, Shkreli scoffed at the office.
He called the Eastern District prosecutor’s office the “junior varsity.”
John Marzulli, a spokesman for the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York, declined to comment on Shkreli’s scornful remarks.
Shkreli also suggested that Winston Paes, the former lead prosecutor in the case, had chickened out of going to trial, by taking a job several months at the large Manhattan firm Debevoise & Plimpton.
“Why would you walk out on the biggest case of your life?” Shkreli said.
Paes, through a colleague, declined to comment to CNBC.
Asked if he thought Brafman’s opening argument was worth $4 million that has supposedly been paid to that attorney’s law firm, Shkreli disputed that amount, and said the reporter who asked about it always gets facts wrong.
A 10-Q filing in May by Retrophin, which ousted Shkreli in 2014, says that he claimed the company owed him $5 million in legal expenses that he had incurred so far in defending both the criminal case and a related civil case by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
So far, Retrophin said, the company has advanced $2.8 million in pre-trial fees for Shkreli’s lawyers, and $2 million in trial fees, for a total of $4.8 million. At the same time, Retrophin is suing Shkreli and cooperating with federal authorities in their cases against him,
Brafman, during a hearing last week, said his firm has been paid $800,000 less than the $4.8 million tally, which prosecutors had cited.
Shkreli told reporters he thought the trial, which entered its third day in Friday, was going well.
He criticized the fact that most headlines from the first day of testimony did not mention the fact that Sarah Hassan, who had invested with his hedge fund in 2011, ended up getting a total of $1.3 million in cash combined with the proceeds of Retrophin stock sales.
“How can a victim make $2.7 million?” Shkreli asked, referring to the total Hassan netted personally and for her family’s hedge fund, which had invested in Retrophin. “She’s not a victim.”
Hassan had testified that after investing $300,000 of her own money in Shkreli’s hedge fund, MSMB Capital, it took her almost a year to get what she was told had grown to $435,000 by the time he decided to close the firm in late 2012. Hassan said Shkreli surprised her by telling her he had, without her knowledge or permission, rolled over her money to help capitalize Retrophin when it was starting up.
Shkreli on Friday told reporters he believed jurors were most impressed not by Hassan’s complaints about the long delay in getting her money, but by the fact that she made “four times” her investment.
“I made nothing,” Shkreli said. Asked what he meant by that, he said he means that he made no money from MSMB Capital.
“They blame me for everything,” Shkreli said, apparently referring to prosecutors and his other critics.
“Blame me for capitalism,” Shkreli said. “Blame me for EpiPen.”
Several prospective jurors earlier this week were excused from consideration because they incorrectly believed Shkreli had raised the price of the anti-allergy device EpiPen. In reality, Shkreli drew widespread public scorn in 2015 for raising the price of an anti-parasite drug named Daraprim, by more than 5,000 percent.
Shkreli also told reporters that he did not prepare tax documents or Retrophin marketing documents that Hassan testified about on Thursday.
Hassan had said that Shkreli dragged his feet in giving her tax documents related to her investment in his hedge fund, and that when she received them they mistakenly listed her father’s name as part of the investment.
Fred Hassan, her dad and a well-known pharma executive, also was listed as a member of Retrophin’s board of directors on a pitch presentation assembled when the company was being created, Sarah Hassan said.
In fact, Fred Hassan never invested in Shkreli’s hedge fund, nor did he have any role as a director, adviser or investor in Retrophin.