America’s most-loathed CEO can’t even get charities to take his money at this point.
Martin Shkreli, the “pharma bro” made infamous after raising the price of an HIV/AIDS drug by 5,000 percent, was arrested, in an unrelated case on Thursday, for securities fraud. In the ensuing aftermath, nonprofit Community Solutions, a group that’s working to end homelessness, returned a hefty donation Shkreli had made to the organization, the Guardian reported.
On Friday, the organization announced that it would give back a $15,000 donation from Shkreli.
“We serve people who depend on access to AIDS meds every day, and as an organization I don’t think we can keep this money,” Jake Maguire, a spokesman for the organization, told the Guardian.
Community Solutions’ stunning decision comes at a time when organizations are on the line to put an end to homelessness.
An estimated 565,000 people were homeless on a single night in January, down 2 percent from last year, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
But nonprofits and government leaders are scrambling to get those figures down even faster considering that the Obama administration has committed to ending chronic veteran homelessness by the end of the year. It set the goal of ending all forms of chronic homelessness by 2017.
Even during this period of heightened pressure, Community Solutions felt it had to turn down such a major donation.
The CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals and KaloBios Pharmaceuticals Inc, Shkreli was charged for his mismanagement of hedge fund MSMB Capital Management and biopharmaceutical company Retrophin Inc, according to Reuters.
He ran his company like a Ponzi scheme and was accused of illegally taking assets from one of his companies to pay off debtors involved in another, according to Bloomberg.
Shkreli told The Wall Street Journal that his arrest is an “injustice” and has also said that he saw no wrongdoing in raising the price of a lifesaving drug from $13.50 to $750 a pill.
“This isn’t the greedy drug company trying to gouge patients,” Shkreli told The New York Times in September, “it is us trying to stay in business.”
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