Judge orders 'Pharma Bro' Martin Shkreli to give up $7.36M US

A U.S. federal judge on Monday ordered Martin Shkreli, the former drug company executive convicted of defrauding investors, to forfeit $7.36 million US in assets, which could include a Picasso painting and a one-of-a-kind album by the Wu-Tang Clan.

U.S. District Judge Kiyo Matsumoto in Brooklyn said the assets Shkreli could forfeit to satisfy the judgment also include $5 million US in a brokerage account and his stake in Vyera Pharmaceuticals, one of the drug companies he founded.

Shkreli is scheduled to be sentenced for securities fraud on Friday.

A lawyer for Shkreli could not immediately be reached for comment on the judge's order.

Shkreli, 34, has been in jail since September, when the judge revoked his bail after he offered a $5,000 US bounty for a strand of Hillary Clinton's hair in a Facebook post.

Shkreli became notorious as the "Pharma Bro" when he raised the price of anti-parasitic drug Daraprim by over 5,000 per cent in 2015 while he was chief executive officer of Turing Pharmaceuticals. Turing is now Vyera.

A jury found him guilty last August of unrelated securities fraud charges. They determined that he lied to investors about the performance of his hedge funds, MSMB Capital and MSMB Healthcare. He also was found guilty of conspiring to manipulate the stock price of another drug company he founded, Retrophin Inc.

Shkreli's lawyers have asked that he be sentenced to 12 to 18 months in prison. They argued in a court filing that a lenient sentence is warranted because none of Shkreli's investors ultimately lost money.