Thursday, March 28

Entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes sentenced to eleven years in prison in the US

The entrepreneur and former Silicon Valley star Elizabeth Holmes has been sentenced this Friday to eleven years and three months in prison for having defrauded the investors of her company, Theranos, by ensuring that she had developed a revolutionary blood analysis system.

Judge Edward Davila has also imposed three years of probation on Holmes, once he is released from jail, and a $400 fine. The entrepreneur will also have to pay a series of indemnities that will be set in the future.

Holmes was convicted last January of four counts of fraud against Theranos investors and faced a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Before reading the sentence, in a court in San José, California, Holmes assured that he loved Theranos. “It was the work of my life,” she said crying, while she acknowledged that she is “devastated” by her failures at the head of the company.

The woman also had words of apologies to Theranos employees, investors and customers: “I am so sorry. I gave it my all, I had to create the company and save it, ”she lamented.

In pre-ruling arguments, Holmes’ lawyer Kevin Downey stressed that unlike other defendants in corporate fraud cases, his client showed no greed by spending the money she earned on “yachts and planes.” Instead, she used the funds “to create medical technology,” Downey said.

For his part, federal prosecutor Jeffrey Schenk pointed out that Holmes gained fame, admiration and a lifestyle thanks to the fraud he committed, despite the fact that he did not obtain financial gain. “These are still benefits,” he recalled.

Holmes, 38, started Theranos in 2003 when he was 19 and dropped out of Stanford University to pursue the company full-time.

The young woman rose to fame for claiming that her firm had invented revolutionary technology to carry out reliable and accurate blood tests for various diseases using only a few drops taken from the fingertips, which lowered costs.

This made her a star in Silicon Valley and in the business world in general, to the point that she was compared to Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.

Theranos quickly attracted investor interest due to the great potential of these alleged blood tests and made its founder a multimillionaire at the age of 31.

However, the daily The Wall Street Journal published a series of investigative articles in late 2015 questioning the credibility of Theranos’s tests and accusing the company of, among other things, diluting blood samples obtained from patients to increase their volume.

These accusations led the US Department of Justice to file charges against Holmes and the company’s former president and operating counselor, Ramseh “Sunny” Balwani (Holmes’s former sentimental partner), whom it accused of having misled investors, doctors and patients. Theranos company was dissolved in September 2018.



www.eldiario.es