I’m glad she was convicted of some things at least. I have my doubts she’ll serve more than a few years though but at least its something.
I imagine for her the worst punishment is if the SEC says she cannot be owner/on the board of a company again.
They could say that only for publicly traded companies, right? Not for any private companies?
Who the hell would ever want to work with her? That’s a rhetorical question. She’s very charming and I’m sure she’d be able to find someone to giver her capital.
Each count is up to twenty years. I could see the maximum for each count served concurrently. Of course there will be an appeal. It’ll be interesting to see if she shows contrition during the sentencing.
Correct. One of my former coworkers did one year in prison and five years probation for accounting fraud. Now he is a controller at a billion dollar private company. He’s banned from working at any listed company.
Happy New Year, Elizabeth Holmes!
I wonder what her New Years resolution was.
I’ll try sharing this WSJ article. I think if I do it this way, it gets you past the paywall, which I’m told by WSJ will be true.
Can someone confirm or not?
Paywalled for me, Bullitt.
Me too.
Thanks, both of you. Please check your PMs.
No one had another three bucks to bring it up to an even six-million?
Are there some reporting requirements that kick in at six- and one-hundred-million? Two of the amounts are strangely just below those thresholds. Or maybe someone embezzled 19 dollars.
Interesting verdict. They found her guilty of four of the seven charges involving defrauding investors but none of the four charges involving Theranos patients. I would have thought that the patients had a stronger case although maybe it was more difficult to prove wire fraud. I was holding off listening to the podcast about the trial until there was a verdict but now I may dive deeper. The jury was fairly definitive in the way that the verdict broke down, though.
Four, really. $99,990 is just below $100k. And $5,349,900 isn’t quite as coincidental, but the two nines still make it a bit unusual.
My guess is that it was difficult to prove that she was the one who defrauded the patients. She directly communicated with investors, so that’s more straightforward. The jurors could still have believed that the patients were defrauded without finding enough evidence that she was responsible.
Right - seems to be that they found that “beyond a reasonable doubt” she was reaching out to investors to put their money forward in the financial side of the scam; they may have felt less confident about meeting that threshold when it came to leading the patients on.
As with getting mobsters for tax evasion, I’ll take the win where I can get it.
Good point. She indirectly, not directly, defrauded the patients.
Likewise. I’ll be interested to see the appeal, and I’d love to be a fly on the wall as Sunny B. meets with his lawyers these next few days.
This is what I was afraid of. The bilking of mostly wealthy venture capitalists is of course criminal conduct, and there were apparently some small scale investors that got caught up in the scam and lost more than they could afford. But it was the fraud perpetrated on ordinary patients that was the uniquely and truly horrific element. But, from what I’ve seen and read, there was no real smoking gun to directly and conclusively link Elizabeth Holmes to that element of the scam. There was a lot of wink, wink, nudge, nudge and dog whistles and creation of a toxic environment where fraud was all but inevitable, and I am mortally certain that Holmes is morally culpable for the fraudulent testing, but there just may not have been a smoking gun.
Still, as others have said, I’m glad they got her on something, and I hope the judge throws the book at her (although I don’t think the judge is technically allowed to consider the patient fraud elements of the scam for sentencing purposes, since she was acquitted on those charges).