On July 7, 2022, a federal jury in the Northern District of California found Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, the former president and COO of failed blood-testing startup Theranos, guilty of ten counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
Balwani and his co-defendant, Elizabeth Holmes, were first charged with fraud in an indictment filed in June 2018. In its Third Superseding Indictment, filed in July 2020, the government alleged that Balwani and Holmes schemed to defraud investors by soliciting investments while misrepresenting the capabilities of Theranos’s proprietary blood analyzer and the financial strength of the company, and schemed to defraud patients who used Theranos’s faulty blood testing laboratory services. Each was charged with two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and ten substantive counts of wire fraud. The jury found Balwani guilty on all twelve counts.
Following a separate trial, Holmes was found guilty in January 2022 on only four counts—three counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud—based on the alleged scheme to defraud investors. The jury hung on three counts, which the government subsequently dismissed, and acquitted Holmes on five counts related to the alleged scheme to defraud patients. Holmes’s...
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