The former president and chief operating officer of the once-promising biotech startup Theranos, Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani, was found guilty of criminal fraud by a Silicon Valley jury, Friday.
The high-profile case is wrapping up yet another chapter in the company's decades-long history.
Balwani, 57, was charged with a dozen counts of wire fraud and conspiracy in relation to his responsibilities as a corporate executive and as Elizabeth Holmes's former lover.
Holmes, who is now 38 years old, established the Silicon Valley business in 2003 at the age of 19 with the intent of revolutionizing diagnostic health care.
Following a three-month trial and approximately 30 hours of deliberations over five days, a jury returned guilty verdicts on all 12 counts.
The guilty verdicts include seven counts of wire fraud for defrauding Theranos investors, two counts of wire fraud for defrauding paying patients, two counts of conspiring to defraud investors and patients, and one count of wire fraud.
In the same courtroom in San Jose, California where a jury convicted Holmes on four counts of fraud in January, Balwani's destiny was decided.
Six years after Theranos was established, Balwani joined the blood-testing venture. For nearly a decade, he and Holmes persuaded investors to fund the creation of an analyzer the size of a desktop printer that could perform a battery of standard tests on as little as two drops of blood from a patient's fingertip.
Prosecutors stated that the two utilized Theranos to scam patients who paid for incorrect tests.
In 2018, following their joint indictment, their cases were separated after Holmes made charges of abuse against her ex-partner.
"Balwani and his legal team are certain to appeal today's verdict, particularly on the counts related to defrauding patients, where the prosecution's evidence was more limited and less direct," Jen Kennedy Park, a partner at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, told Yahoo Finance.
Park later added that a database holding Theranos patient test information that the defendants turned over to prosecutors, but which was deleted before government attorneys could see it, may have influenced the jury's judgment.
The result also indicates that the jurors rejected Balwani's "extremely speculative claim" that the database Theranos lost in 2018 would have proved his innocence, Park added.
Judge Davila appeared to concur with this position when he dismissed Balwani's request for a jury instruction ordering that the jurors believe the database held detrimental information to the government, Park added.
