Apparently it’s pretty hard for a company to stay in business when its former CEO is one of the most reviled people on the internet. Just ask KaloBios Pharmaceuticals, the company formerly run by everyone’s least favorite price-gouging “pharma bro,” Martin Shkreli. It filed for bankruptcy on Tuesday.
Shkreli was arrested two weeks ago on fraud charges and for allegedly running a Ponzi-like scheme when he was the CEO of yet another biopharmaceutical company, Retrophin. He was released later that day on a $5 million bond package.
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KaloBios disclosed in its bankruptcy filing yesterday that its assets and liabilities are between $1 million to $10 million.
Shkreli briefly became the CEO of KaloBios on November 20 before being fired last Monday. Shkreli resigned from his other troubled company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, following his arrest earlier this month. Last week, Turing announced they are cutting jobs and looking for a new chief executive to replace Shkreli.
KaloBios’s filing of a Chapter 11 bankruptcy claim on Tuesday comes just a day after the company challenged a delisting letter from the Nasdaq Stock Exchange. Nasdaq issued the delisting letter to the company last week, citing the allegations of fraud leveled against Shkreli and the company’s outside counsel, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Shkreli initially drew national scorn from all corners of the internet for raising the price of the drug Daraprim, a common anti-parasitic medication, from $13.50 to $750 per tablet after he acquired the drug at Turing. Politicians and the public pointed to his actions as proof of the pharmaceutical industry’s greed. His swift downfall has been met with near rapturous schadenfreude.
