Integrity and selflessness are among the traits that ethical leaders should uphold in their work. Integrity means being transparent and fully honest with your dealings without any supervision. Selflessness is putting the interests of others before your own. These two traits can make a stout ethical leader. Unfortunately, leadership fails when there is dishonesty and self-interests. One such leadership is that of Mr. Martin Shkreli, the founder and former CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals.
Shkreli is a top manager of the Turing pharmaceuticals charged with acts of short selling, price gouging, and fraud in his leadership. The former CEO defrauded investors and the public by greedily overpricing costs of drugs. For instance, Shkreli overpriced the cost of Daraprim from $13.50 per tablet to $750 per tablet (Smythe & Geiger, 2015) . This is a drug used by pregnant women to cure life-threatening parasitic infection and those with poor immune systems due to diseases like HIV and cancer. Shkreli also short sold biotech stocks as a way of ruining the reputation of this stock so his stock could have a high value in the market. According to the US SEC, Shkreli misappropriated more than $1 million in investors’ capital using two hedge funds he had set up in his early twenties (Farr, 2015) .
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The leadership failure in Turing Pharmaceuticals was due to greed and self-interests. Turing should have a strong internal and external audit system that helped report such instances in the company. Auditing would have helped notice the fraud and self-interest in the former CEO. Strong and reliable corporate governance would have helped the company mitigate the problem early.
References
Farr, C. (2015, December 18). Five Moments leading up to the Arrest of Pharma's "Bad Boy" . Retrieved April 27, 2018, from FastCompany: https://www.fastcompany.com/3054867/five-moments-leading-up-to-arrest-of-pharmas-bad-boy
Smythe, C., & Geiger, K. (2015, December 17). Shkreli, Drug Price Gouger, Denies Fraud and Posts Bail . Retrieved April 27, 2018, from Bloomberg: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-martin-shkreli-securities-fraud/
