UNTIL a few days ago few people had heard of Martin Shkreli, a 32-year-old former hedge fund investor from New York.

Now he has found himself catapulted into global notoriety after the pharma-ceutical company Turing, where he is chief executive, this week increased the price of the life-saving drug Daraprim by a whopping 5,000 per cent.

Last month the company bought the rights to the drug, which is used mainly to treat toxoplasmosis, a parasitic infection that affects people with compromised immune systems, including AIDS and HIV patients, as well as cancer sufferers.

Some patients take between five and 10 tablets every day, meaning this price hike – which only affects patients in the US – may condemn thousands of Americans either to bankruptcy or a shorter life expectancy

And yet it costs less than 75p to make each Daraprim pill, which was first approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the 1950s.

Speaking on Bloomberg News earlier this week Shkreli attempted to defend himself saying that the paltry production costs don’t include the price of marketing and distribution.

He said: “If there was a company that was selling an Aston Martin at the price of a bicycle and we bought that company and charged Toyota prices I don’t think that should be a crime. We’re simply charging the right price. We have to turn a profit.”

Shkreli added that these profits will be used to make improvements to the 62-year-old drug recipe and that it is “still underpriced relative to its peers”.

His explanation is unlikely to satisfy his critics. They have labeled him a “morally bankrupt sociopath”, a “scumbag” and “everything that is wrong with money, medicine and politics in America”. Hillary Clinton this week joined the chorus, declaring: “Price gouging like this in the specialty drug market is outrageous. Tomorrow I’ll lay out a plan to take it on.”

Yet Shkreli’s response to his online critics was to tweet defiant lyrics from a song by rapper Eminem. (“And it seems like the media immediately points a finger at me/ So I point one back at ’em, but not the index or pinkie.”)

Judith Aberg, a spokeswoman for the HIV Medicine Association, said that even patients with insurance to cover some of the inflated cost of Daraprim could end up more than £100 per pill out of pocket now that the price has gone up from £8.78 to a staggering £488.26 per pill.  ($750 in U.S. currency).

This month Aberg joined forces with the Infectious Diseases Society of America to pen an open letter to Shkreli. In it they said that the proposed massive price increase on Daraprim was “unjustifiable for the medically vulnerable patient population” and was “unsustainable for the healthcare system”.

Shkreli has long courted controversy. The son of Albanian and Croatian immigrants he grew up in a working-class community in Brooklyn, New York and subsequently gained a business degree in 2004.

Aged 17 he began an internship at a hedge fund founded by American TV personality and best-selling author Jim Cramer and two years later he launched his own such fund. But it closed a year later after a £1.5million lawsuit from Lehman Brothers which collapsed before a verdict was reached.

We have to turn a profit

Undeterred Shkreli then set up MSMB Capital Management in 2008. It funded his first foray into the pharmaceutical industry in 2011 when he founded a biotech firm called Retrophin, which focused on producing medicines for rare diseases.

Yesterday it also emerged that Shkreli is a repeat offender when it comes to inflating the price of drugs. In May 2014 Retrophin acquired the rights to sell a drug named Thiola which is used to treat a rare and incurable kidney condition known as cystinuria. Many sufferers have to take the drug from early childhood.

Shkreli’s company promptly increased the price of Thiola from £1 per pill to more than £20 a pill.

In September 2014 Shkreli was ousted as head of the company amid allegations of misuse of company money and is now being sued by Retrophin for £43million. He denied the accusations, claiming: “They are sort of concocting this wild and crazy and unlikely story to swindle me out of the money.”

His integrity may be shrouded in doubt but Shkreli’s ego and ambition remain intact and in February this year he launched his present company Turing.

In the past 48 hours he has sought to address the Daraprim debacle, claiming that he will now lower the price of the drug to make it more affordable. But he has not revealed exactly what the new cost to patients will be.

Whatever the adjustment to the figures it has been called an empty gesture that has come too late. There was an insight on Shkreli’s now-deleted profile on a dating website called OK Cupid in which he described himself as “intelligent, handsome and all sorts of other good qualities”.

“I am endlessly entertaining, providing comedic relief and artistic thought in one convenient package. What a catch!” He also revealed he spends a lot of time thinking about “human suffering”.

The suffering of those families with a loved one who is reliant on Daraprim doesn’t seem to have occurred to him, however, nor the huge financial investment that they now face in order to maintain their health.

“State visit” doesn’t do justice to what we’ve seen this week.

The Chinese media exulted that their president got a ‘redder than red carpet welcome’ in the UK and certainly Xi Jinping rarely stepped off the carpet, or went anywhere without a royal at his side.

And if it wasn’t the Queen, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge or Prince Andrew, then there was always the Prime Minister or the Chancellor ready to stand in.

All of this demonstrated just how much Britain is staking on this relationship. The United States may be growing more cagy in its dealings with the world’s great rising power, but the UK is moving in the other direction, prepared to take risks to “run towards China”.

The promised “golden era” with China is a strategic shift and the British effort to get it off to a good start produced spectacular picture opportunities for President Xi and a lot of behind the scenes anxiety for his hosts, his enormous entourage, and frankly, for journalists like me.

Of course there was no meaningful access for me or any other British journalist to the Chinese president himself. Chinese officials hate surprises and an unscripted interview with a real reporter is their definition of prolonged and nasty surprise.

Information bubble

Instead there was a photo opportunity in Downing Street that both governments chose to call a “press conference”. One question was allowed from the British media and President Xi had clearly prepared his answer.

We weren’t told until minutes beforehand that the President would actually attend. I had messaged a Chinese Foreign Ministry official asking for guidance and heard nothing until four hours after the news conference took place when I got a reply which read: “I don’t have any information about that.”

Which makes the point that even when things have happened on live TV they haven’t officially “happened” for those inside the Chinese information bubble until someone senior has agreed it.

The important message President Xi wanted to send home to the Chinese public was not conveyed in a press conference anyway, but in the wall to wall TV pictures.

They should observe that in President Xi they have a modern day emperor who bestrides the globe, and they should reflect that he has restored China to its rightful place in the world.

Pomp and propaganda

For those whose historical awareness might be befuddled by all the tiaras and trumpets, the Communist Party flagship People’s Daily provided a front page editorial to drive home the message: “The national humiliation that China suffered in modern times began with the rumble of cannon from British warships.

“But times have changed. China does not bully those past aggressors with its strength.”

Talking about reporting of the visit, I came in for criticism from one Chinese publication, which accused me of “skewed and hysterical propaganda” after the BBC broadcast a TV documentary I made about President Xi himself.

But all is not as it seems in the world of propaganda. As I was rushing from one event to another, a reporter for one of China’s biggest state media organisations grabbed me by the arm, not to berate me but to say he was a fan.

In the British camp, critics of their government’s campaign to become China’s “best partner in the West” drew attention to Beijing’s censorship and the authoritarian political culture.

By the end of the visit some were even angrier than they had been at the start, complaining that at every venue, human rights protesters were penned behind police barriers, obscured by giant Chinese flags and drowned out by the cymbals and drums of the Chinese patriots.

Even British officials who have seen many world leaders come and go said the security for President Xi was on a daunting scale.

As someone who lives and works in Beijing, I’m probably more used to this than most, but I almost missed a live broadcast for the main evening news on Wednesday night as I struggled to find my way into the Guildhall.

For the banquet in honour of President Xi, it had become a fortress inside a labyrinth, almost impenetrable behind barriers, police and identity checks.

British policing of Chinese visits is always controversial as it is simply not possible to square Beijing’s demand for the inviolable dignity of Chinese leaders with the British expectation of the right to protest.

Predictably, the week ended with the Metropolitan Police answering questions about their handling of the visit, on this occasion about why they arrested three demonstrators and searched their homes.

I suspect, however, that Met chiefs will be as relieved as both governments that the VIP came and went without greater incident. And the officials who choreographed the visit for both governments may reflect that there were really only two clouds over their week.

‘Win-win’ narrative

The absence of Prince Charles from the state banquet and the news story of British jobs lost in part due to alleged dumping of cheap Chinese steel. But both clouds passed over without lowering the diplomatic temperature.

The Speaker of the Commons may have told the Chinese president to show moral vision, a former adviser to the Prime Minister may have fumed about national humiliation, and a backbench MP complained that the British government was a “fawning spaniel that licks the hand that beats it” but to the two governments embarking on the “golden era” these were non-fatal blows.

Instead, the photo opportunities, the business deals and the speeches of the past week combined to write the first chapter of the “win-win” narrative they want to develop.

“The stronger our economic partnership, the stronger our relationship to have the necessary and frank discussions about other issues,” said the Prime Minister in defending the language of the golden era from accusations of sell out.

But even after this extraordinary week for UK-China relations, there seem to be as many British sceptics as before: some who doubt the economic partnership; some who doubt how strong the rest of the relationship is; and some who doubt both.

Over time, we’ll get a better idea of who’s right. We’ll see how strong the economic partnership is, how strong the underlying relationship, and whether Britain’s big China gamble is paying off.