Guilty of wire fraud and conspiracy to defraud.
It is the verdict against Elizabeth Holmes, the woman who a few years ago came to be considered “the new Steve Jobs” for her success with Theranos, a health technology company that quickly made millions in profits.
On Monday, a federal jury of eight men and four women told Holmes guilty of three counts of fraud – mail and one of conspires tion to defraud investors .
The 37-year-old woman was not detained and there is no exact date for the sentence, which could be 20 years for each of the four charges she was found guilty of.
In total, she faced 11 charges, the jury found her not guilty of another four, related to public fraud, and was unable to reach a unanimous verdict on the remaining three.
Holmes claimed to have developed a machine that could perform a series of medical tests with just a few drops of blood taken from a prick on the patient’s finger.
But the company collapsed after an investigation by The Wall Street Journal found that the devices weren’t as effective as Holmes claimed.
Holmes herself took the stand to defend herself during the trial.
“We worked for years with teams of scientists and engineers to miniaturize all the technologies in the laboratory,” he said in his testimony.
Holmes smiled and spoke confidently about the origins of the company and why he wanted to help people.
Throughout the two-month trial, jurors in California heard testimony from more than two dozen prosecution witnesses . Among them were patients and investors whom prosecutors said Holmes misled.
Her lawyers say the businesswoman did not intend to defraud, but rather “naively underestimated” the challenges her company faced.
Silicon Valley Favorite
Holmes rose to fame for allegedly inventing a revolutionary system to lower blood test costs, making her a star in Silicon Valley and in the business world at large.
Her company Theranos, founded in 2003, attracted investor interest because of the great potential of these blood tests and made its founder a multimillionaire at age 31 .
The Theranos tests cost a quarter or even less than traditional tests, prompting the US pharmacy chain Walgreens to partner with Holmes’ company to offer the tests in its California and Arizona stores. .
The Wall Street Journal published a series of investigative articles in late 2015 questioning the credibility of Theranos analyzes and accusing the company, among other things, of diluting blood samples obtained from patients to increase its volume.
These accusations led the US Department of Justice to file charges against Holmes and the former president and former chief operating officer of the company, Ramseh “Sunny” Balwani (Holmes’s ex-partner), whom it accused of misleading investors. , to doctors and patients.
The Theranos company was dissolved in September 2018 .
Analysts say the Theranos case is taken as the worst example of the excesses of Silicon Valley, which – according to critical voices – encourages people without ethical standards to prosper.
