Dec. 10 (UPI) — A federal jury this week in Maryland convicted two ex-CEOs of a Washington biotech company for their role in a multi-million dollar securities fraud scheme related to HIV and COVID-19 drugs, the U.S. Justice Department announced Tuesday.
The jury on Monday ruled that Nader Pourhassan, 61, of Lake Oswego, Ore., along with his counterpart 71-year old Kazem Kazempour of Potomac, Md., engaged in a scheme to lie to investors about development of an experimental drug in order to artificially inflate and maintain the price of its stock so as to attract new investors for CytoDyn Inc., a publicly traded biotechnology company based in Vancouver, Wash.
“The defendants lied to investors and the public — including during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic — about a drug that purportedly treated HIV and COVID-19 in order to artificially inflate CytoDyn’s stock price,” Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Nicole M. Argentieri, head of DOJ’s criminal division, wrote Tuesday in a release .
The men are scheduled to be sentenced by a federal judge at a later date and face a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison for each count of securities and wire fraud along with insider trading…