The former CEO and founder of Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes, faces up to 20 years in prison, having been found guilty of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud, according to an Engadget report.
A jury convicted her on two counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit fraud after seven days of deliberation following a three-month trial. Holmes faced 11 charges in total and was found not guilty of four charges, with the jury deadlocked on the remaining three.
The trial heard how Holmes’s company had promised tech that would scan for hundreds of diseases with just a few drops of blood from a finger prick, revolutionising medical testing. The concept helped Theranos raise more than $900 million from billionaires such as media mogul Rupert Murdoch and software magnate Larry Ellison.
It turned Holmes from an unknown into a Silicon Valley sensation, worth an estimated $4.5 billion fortune on paper. But investors did not know Theranos’ blood-testing technology kept producing misleading results.
This forced patients to undergo regular blood draws instead of the promised finger sticks, which Theranos secretly tested using conventional machines in a traditional laboratory setting.
The deception only came to light in 2015 after a series of explosive articles in The Wall Street Journal and a regulatory audit of Theranos uncovered potentially dangerous flaws in the company’s technology.
Holmes denied the accusation that she had intentionally misled investors, suggesting that investors had misinterpreted her statements about what Theranos’ tech could do.
However, the jury listened to recordings and watched videos of her lying about what types of blood tests the company could do. Holmes and Balwani were also found guilty of conspiring to commit wire fraud. Balwani now faces his own trial for the same wire fraud charges, set to commence in February.
Source: standard
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