A judge in San José (California) imposed this Wednesday almost thirteen years in prison, and another three on probation, to Ramesh 'Sunny' Balwani, 57, a former partner and lover of Elizabet Holmes in the Theranos scam, the starup that sold blood tests instantly and that turned out to be a fraud, leaving Silicon Valley a world of merciless egoists.
The sentence for Balwanni, who received a guilty verdict in July on 12 counts, is even longer than the one Holmes received last month, which received 11 years for eight offences.
Balwani has a date of March 15 to begin compliance, ordered Judge Edward Davila after announcing the sentence. He is the same judge who presided over the previous trial and who sentenced Holmes.
Theranos promised that it had the ability to perform rapid blood tests for a variety of diseases with a simple prick and a drop of blood. In this way he managed to amass hundreds of millions of dollars in investments, which attracted numerous celebrities and major companies, before going under after a series of investigative reports from 'The Wall Street Journal'. Behind the image of the successful Holmes and her partner there was nothing. The assembly of the initiative that was going to revolutionize the healthcare world sank four years ago like a house of cards.
As president and head of the operations office, Balwani was required to review the company's laboratories, where the most egregious and misconduct occurred, the prosecutor stressed. During the trial, the prosecutors called witnesses who pointed out that these inappropriate blood tests caused real damage.
“Balwani was made aware that Theranos was not offering, and would not offer in the future, any income by being honest with people,” said prosecutor Jeff Schenk. "So he chose another path," he qualified. The text messages revealed during the oral hearing confirmed the main role of the defendant.
“I am responsible for everything at Theranos,” he wrote in 2015. “They have all been my decisions too,” he continued. His defense argued that he acted in good faith at all times. "I believed, and had every reason to believe, in that world-class scientific equipment of the laboratories and the technology they developed," the defense remarked.
Holmes and Balwani were in a romantic relationship for most of the company's history, which they tried to keep secret from employees. But when she organized her defense, Holmes presented himself as a victim of Balwani's abuse, which he has denied.
The two sentences mark the last chapter of a scandal that began seven years ago and that the two convicts dismissed at first as a fit of envy for their success. The scandal entered popular culture, with books, television series, and at least one movie in the works.
Theranos also became a warning to Silicon Valley about the criminal risk of offering misleading investments to investors and consumers with alleged technological advances.
"The evidence shows that Balwani knew about the fraud," the judge remarked when reading the sentence. He called the Theranos case "a real flight from honest business practices."
