Martin Shkreli will no longer indulge his hobby of mouthing off his opinons to the press. That's the one condition that his new lawyer, Benjamin Brafman, asked the former CEO accused of massive securities fraud for taking his case.
According to CNBC, Brafman is known for defending equally high-powered, controversial, and visible clients such as Michael Jackson, Jay Z and Sean "Diddy" Combs and former International Monetary Fund managing director, Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Brafman, Shkreli's new criminal defense lawyer, told reporters outside Brooklyn's U.S. Federal Court his reasons for asking his client to maintain silence during the time that the case is being tried.
Brafman said, "We believe this case is very defensible. We don't believe that Mr. Shkreli ever knowingly violated the law or intended to defraud anyone, and we want to try this case in the courtroom and not in the media."
Meanwhile, Reuters quotes Brafman on another turn of events that had befallen his client: "There's nothing like an indictment to affect the price of shares even if the shares have significant value." Brafman was alluding to the drop in value of Shkreli's frozen trading account from $45 million to $4 million. This decline was in turn caused by the filing of bankruptcy of KaloBios Pharmaceuticals in December of 2015; Shkreli ran KalosBios before it fired him following his arrest.
The loss suffered by Shkreli prompted Assistant U.S. Attorney Winston Paes to advise U.S. District Judge Kiyo Matsumoto that the former pharma CEO might need to secure other assets to pay for his $5 million bond.
Meanwhile, Shkreli's lawyer-inflicted gag continues. Brafman told Vanity Fair that his client would remain silent during the Congressional and Senate hearings that he had been called on to attend. Shkreli would take the Fifth Amendment and invoke the right not to indict himself, says Brafman.
