Elizabeth Holmes, a high-profile advisor and ex-girlfriend to the fallen Theranos founder, was convicted Thursday of defrauding investors and patients at the failed blood-testing startup.
The jury found Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani guilty of all 12 counts of fraud indicted by federal prosecutors, a spokesman for the San Jose, Silicon Valley courthouse told AFP.
He is due to be sentenced later this year and faces several years in prison.
Balwani was tried separately from former US biotech star Holmes, whose trial in the same courtroom in January ended with a guilty verdict on four counts of tricking investors into pouring money into a supposedly revolutionary blood-testing system.
But the jury – who had spent weeks listening to sometimes complex evidence – also acquitted her of four counts and could not reach a verdict on three others.
During her trial, Holmes alleged that Balwani was emotionally and physically abusive throughout their romantic relationship – allegations he has denied.
Holmes and Balwani are rare examples of tech executives being indicted over a company’s flameout in a sector littered with the carcasses of failed startups that once promised untold fortunes.
Her trial highlighted the blurred line between the frenzy that characterizes the industry and outright criminal dishonesty. She is due to be sentenced in September.
US Attorney Robert Leach told a jury in a San Jose federal court that Balwani ran the company alongside Holmes and that the two were “partners in everything, including their crime.”
But 57-year-old Balwani’s lawyer, Stephen Cazares, said his client has never committed fraud and believes in Theranos’s potential.
Balwani, nearly two decades older than Holmes, was brought in to run the company she founded in 2003 at the age of 19.
Holmes, now 38, later promised self-service testing machines that could perform an analysis scale inexpensively and with just a few drops of blood – a promise dashed amid allegations of fraud.
Prosecutors claimed that Holmes and Balwani were aware the technology was not working as advertised, but continued to promote it as revolutionary to patients and the investors who pumped money into the company.
As Theranos rose, it attracted luminaries like Rupert Murdoch and Henry Kissinger, but a series of reports from Murdoch’s own Wall Street Journal challenging the company’s claims set the company’s collapse in motion.
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