Former chief working officer of blood-testing startup was discovered responsible of conspiracy and fraud in July.
Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, the previous Theranos govt and enterprise companion of disgraced biotech entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes, has been sentenced to almost 13 years in jail for defrauding buyers and sufferers.
Balwani, 57, was on Wednesday sentenced to 12 years and 11 months in jail after being discovered responsible in July of two counts of conspiracy and 10 counts of fraud over his function within the blood-testing startup Theranos’s fraudulent claims.
United States District Decide Edward Davila deferred a choice on a request by prosecutors for Balwani to be ordered to pay $804m in restitution – the identical quantity sought from Holmes – to a later listening to.
Balwani’s sentence comes lower than a month after Theranos founder and former CEO Holmes was sentenced to greater than 11 years in jail for her function within the scandal, which solid a lightweight on the pitfalls of Silicon Valley’s tradition of boundless ambition and cutthroat competitors.
Balwani, who was in a romantic relationship with Holmes till 2016, had confronted as much as 20 years in jail.
Federal prosecutors had sought a 15-year sentence for Balwani, who was the chief working officer and president at Theranos, arguing he had offered a “faux story about Theranos’ expertise and monetary stability day after day in assembly after assembly.”
Balwani’s legal professionals, who argued the Indian-born entrepreneur was not motivated by greed or fame and had suffered significantly as a result of intense media protection of Theranos, had requested for four-10 months.
Theranos, which was based in 2003 by Holmes when she was 19, claimed to have devised new blood-testing expertise that allowed sufferers to simply carry out greater than 200 totally different medical assessments with a pinprick of blood.
In actuality, the corporate secretly used conventional testing strategies and gave sufferers inaccurate outcomes.
Theranos, which was as soon as valued at $10bn and had the backing of high-profile buyers together with former US Treasury Secretary George Schultz and media mogul Rupert Murdoch, was extensively lauded as a Silicon Valley success story, with Holmes drawing comparisons to Steve Jobs.
The startup’s downfall, which has been chronicled in a e-book, documentary and award-winning TV collection, was set in movement in 2015 after scientists and a collection of stories within the Wall Road Journal referred to as into query the corporate’s claims.
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