According to the indictment, the young entrepreneur deliberately deceived her investors.
(Photo: AP)
San Jose Former model entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes has been found guilty of fraud against several of her investors by US jurors. The guilty verdict affects only four of a total of eleven charges, as reported by the Wall Street Journal and the Bloomberg financial service on Monday (local time) from the courtroom in San Jose, California. You are now threatened with up to 20 years imprisonment per charge. The sentence should be announced at a later date.
Holmes had founded the ultimately failed blood test start-up Theranos and raised several hundred million dollars from investors. She always denied the fraud allegation. Theranos’ great promise was to revolutionize blood tests: just a few drops from your finger should be enough to carry out extensive analyzes. The overall valuation of Theranos reached up to nine billion dollars in the financing rounds, and Holmes’ fortune also amounted to several billion dollars, at least on paper.
Holmes founded Theranos in 2003 as a 19-year-old college graduate and carefully cultivated her image as a rising star of the tech scene. It was well received in Silicon Valley and beyond. Investors like media mogul Rupert Murdoch and Oracle founder Larry Ellison put more than $ 900 million into the start-up company. At times, the company was worth more than $ 10 billion, Holmes was considered the youngest self-made billionaire in the United States. The now 37-year-old was celebrated as a visionary and compared in press articles with Apple founder Steve Jobs.
Among other things, the drugstore chain Walgreens got in and granted space for Theranos blood tests in their stores. As it turned out, however, Theranos technology was never sufficiently reliable. The tests were not carried out with the company’s own machines, but with laboratory technology from other manufacturers. The indictment accused Holmes of deliberately duping financiers in order to get hold of the investments. According to US media reports, the jury saw this confirmed in the case of three injections of money – and found Holmes guilty of conspiracy to commit fraud on another count.
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Holmes testified at the trial that she sincerely believed in the technology, but that as chief executive, she was not informed of all of the problems. For a conviction, the prosecutors had to convince the jury that Holmes had deliberately made false statements. On three counts, the jury could not agree on the necessary unanimous vote, as they announced a few hours before the verdict.
More: Cheater or Failed? Ex-billionaire Elizabeth Holmes faces 20 years in prison