Shkreli’s Former Company Names New GC

Retrophin Inc., the biopharmaceutical company locked in litigation with its embattled founder Martin Shkreli, announced earlier this week it has appointed Elizabeth Reed as its general counsel and corporate secretary.

Reed joins from Celladon Corporation, where she was general counsel and secretary, and which merged in 2016 with Eiger BioPharmaceuticals, Inc.

Retrophin has been in the headlines since December 2015, when a federal grand jury in Brooklyn indicted Shkreli on securities fraud charges, accusing him of plundering assets from the company in order to repay investors in a separate hedge fund he operated.

The indictment also named Retrophin’s onetime outside counsel Evan Greebel, a former Katten Muchin Rosenman partner, as a defendant for allegedly helping Shkreli with his scheme. Both Greebel and Shkreli have pleaded not guilty.

According to the indictment, Greebel sometimes acted as corporate secretary for Retrophin and attended board meetings. Ben Brafman and Marc Agnifilo, lawyers for Shkreli, have suggested in court documents they may invoke an ‘advice of counsel’ defense strategy, and are seeking documents from Katten they say will show their client “sought and received his lawyers’ legal advice and he followed it.”

Greebel who departed Katten in June 2015 is represented by Gibson Dunn’s Reed Brodsky, who declined to comment.

Retrophin also sued Shkreli in 2015 for $65 million for allegedly breaching his duty of loyalty to the company and misusing funds in a suit that is still pending; in February 2016, the company also agreed to pay investors $3 million in a settlement related to his tenure as CEO of the company.

The company appointed appointed its first general counsel, Margaret Valeur-Jensen, in November 2014 shortly after Shkreli left the company as CEO and was replaced by board member Stephen Aselage. She previously worked in house at Amgen and at Davis, Polk & Wardwell.

Valeur-Jensen’s departure from the company has been in the works since February 2016 when the company announced her transition to retirement pending the hire of a replacement. According to a March 2015 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Valeur-Jensen received a base salary of $425,000 plus a bonus targeted at 50 percent of her salary.

The agreement to retire gave Valeur-Jensen 50,000 shares of restricted stock units which would all have vested as of Dec. 31, 2016. Retrophin has stock has hovered around $19 per share for the last month although it is not clear how much the restricted stock units are worth.

She could not be reached for comment but is staying at the company through the transition.

The new GC, Reed earlier in her career spent time at Cooley, the company’s outside counsel in several cases. A spokesman for Retrophin declined to comment outside of the press release.