The U.S. Attorney’s Office has asked for 15 years in prison for the founder of the medical device company Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes, for one of the most scandalous scam cases in recent Silicon Valley history.
Holmes, 38, was found guilty in February of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit fraud hidden in a promise to revolutionize healthcare with its low-cost blood tests that ended up dissolved in 2018 after the validity of its methods were called into question.
The prosecution has further proposed to the court to force Holmes to make full restitution of the money lost by its investors, including Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. and Safeway Inc. for an amount that could amount to approximately €800 million.
According to the prosecution document, picked up by Bloomberg, Holmes worked in a «reality-distorting field» in which his quest for fame justified a web of falsehoods and deceptions that risked patients’ lives.
According to prosecutors, Holmes took advantage of investors’ desire to make the world «a better place to lure them into believing his lies.» Prosecutors lamented that Holmes, throughout the trial, has appeared in court «without remorse and without any accountability.»
The government’s sentencing memorandum sets the stage for a final showdown on Nov. 18 in federal court in San Jose, California, before U.S. District Judge Edward Davila.
Holmes’ own lawyers, by contrast, are proposing that she be exempted from prison and sentenced to home confinement and community service so that she can continue her volunteer work counseling sexual assault victims that she began in recent months.
The February conviction ended a nearly two-decade saga since 2003 when the then darling of Silicon Valley and venture capital firms founded Theranos, which at its zenith reached a valuation of $9 billion (7.944 billion euros).
In this way, in 2015 she was named by ‘Forbes’ as the youngest self-made billionaire and topped the covers of magazines.
However, the star of Theranos and its founder began to fade at the end of that same year, when the newspaper ‘The Wall Street Journal’ questioned in several articles the supposedly revolutionary methods of the biotech, causing the opening of investigations by regulators and finally the dissolution of the company in 2018.
