Martin Shkreli won a court ruling allowing him to move forward with his strategy of blaming his ex-lawyers to defend himself against criminal fraud charges.
The 33-year-old founder of Retrophin and Turing Pharmaceuticals, dubbed the “most hated man in America” in the media for raising the price of a potentially life-saving drug by 5,000 percent, persuaded a judge to order his former law firm to turn over three years’ worth of documents. He says the evidence will help clear him.
U.S. District Judge Kiyo Matsumoto issued the order Wednesday over the objections of the law firm, Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP, which argued it shouldn’t be forced to hand over almost 600,000 pages of material, including 175,000 e-mails and documents, which covers years of work for multiple entities.
Shkreli’s securities-fraud case stems from his operation of two hedge funds. Federal prosecutors say he defrauded investors in the hedge funds and used $11 million of Retrophin assets to pay them off. He’s also accused of hiding his control in the company’s unrestricted stock to help pay off his debts.
Shkreli’s current attorneys claim he can show that he acted in good faith and without criminal intent in connection with the decisions that got him charged with a crime.
“Shkreli sought and received his lawyers’ legal advice and he followed it,” his lawyers, Ben Brafman and Marc Agnifilo, said in their request for the Katten records.
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A Katten lawyer previously said that Shkreli may also have already received many of the documents because the law firm turned them over to the government in May 2015 as part of a grand jury investigation.
A complication is that a former Katten lawyer, Evan Greebel, is accused of helping Shkreli carry out part of the scam and to cover his tracks.
Both Shkreli and Greebel have pleaded not guilty and face trial in June.
At a pretrial hearing scheduled for Thursday, one topic is whether Greebel may ask for a separate trial.