Ex-Theranos president Sunny Balwani sentenced to nearly 13 years in prison | 24CA News

A U.S. decide on Wednesday sentenced former Theranos president Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani to 12 years and 11 months in jail on costs of defrauding buyers and sufferers of the blood-testing start-up led by Elizabeth Holmes, a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office confirmed.

U.S. District Judge Edward Davila in San Jose, Calif., imposed the sentence on Balwani, who was convicted by a jury on two counts of conspiracy and 10 counts of fraud in July.

Prosecutors stated Balwani, 57, conspired with Holmes, 38, to deceive Silicon Valley buyers into believing the corporate had achieved miniaturized machines that would precisely run a broad array of medical diagnostic checks from a small quantity of blood.

Meanwhile, the corporate secretly relied on conventional strategies to run checks and supplied sufferers with inaccurate outcomes, prosecutors stated.

Holmes, who began the corporate as a university scholar and have become its public face, was indicted alongside Balwani, her former romantic accomplice, in 2018.

Davila later granted every a separate trial after Holmes stated she would take the stand and testify that Balwani was abusive of their relationship. He has denied the allegations.

Holmes acquired lesser sentence

Holmes was convicted in January on 4 counts of fraud and conspiracy however acquitted of defrauding sufferers.

Davila sentenced Holmes to 11 years and three months in jail at a listening to final month, calling Theranos a enterprise “dashed by untruths, misrepresentations, plain hubris and lies.”

Prosecutors subsequently argued Balwani ought to obtain 15 years in jail, saying he knew Theranos’s checks have been inaccurate from overseeing the corporate’s laboratory operations, and determined to “prioritize Theranos’s financial health over patients’ real health.”

The probation workplace had beneficial a nine-year sentence.

Balwani’s attorneys requested for a sentence of probation, arguing that he sought to make the world a greater place by means of Theranos and was not motivated by fame or greed.

Once valued at $9 billion US, Theranos promised to revolutionize how sufferers obtain diagnoses by changing conventional labs with small machines envisioned to be used in properties, drugstores and even on the battlefield.

The firm collapsed after a collection of Wall Street Journal articles in 2015 questioned its expertise.