SAN FRANCISCO — A grand jury has indicted CEO Elizabeth Holmes and her former No. 2 Sunny Balwani for alleged fraud at Theranos, the disgraced Silicon Valley company that once promised to revolutionize blood testing in a pitch that was too good to be true.
The criminal charges filed by federal prosecutors allege that Holmes and Balwani bilked investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars while also defrauding doctors and patients through years of lies that put thousands of people in personal danger.
You got the math right on the maximum fine for each defendant but 11 counts times 20 is a sentence with a maximum of 220 years in prison.
These are very serious crimes.
Great article!
I’m glad Elizabeth Holmes can’t abuse patients and may get thrown into prison for those crimes. For every Elizabeth Holmes, it gives the public that much more reason to think our industry sucks.
Next let’s see a story about recently in-the-news Momenta Pharma! Kate Strayer-Benton, their Director of Strategy, tried to to look good by ruining the reputations of professional female artists at BIO. Shame!
Momenta Pharma, as we all know, filed and lost a lawsuit to stop a new generic anticoagulant (enoxaparin) from getting onto the market. It was basically heparin, the oldest drug in the book. That lawsuit almost bankrupted the cheaper drugmaker! Momenta claimed their patent was worth $938 million (crazy huh!), but the jury saw through their evil lies, and surely saved patients a fortune!
Oh, and Kate/Momenta’s new MS drug is a clone of an old standard drug, Copaxone, which isn’t new, and yet which Momenta charge patients over $60,000 per year!
How many patients can even afford that?!
Rebecca and STAT, keep it up, so proud to see you write about patient abusers and really greedy companies for once!