An American jury on Thursday found Ramesh Sunny Balwani guilty of defrauding investors and patients with fake claims of diagnosing hundreds of health conditions by using a few drops of drops. His ex-girlfriend Elizabeth Holmes has already been convicted in the same case and is facing a 20-year jail term.
Balwani had wrongly claimed that a device invented by his company, Theranos, could detect hundreds of diseases with a few drops of blood.
Who Is Ramesh Sunny Balwani?
Ramesh Balwani was born in 1965 in Pakistan to an affluent Sindhi farming family. He went to study at posh Aitchison College boarding school in Lahore. His family later moved to India since being Hindus in a Muslim-dominated Pakistan was proving to be very difficult. The family later immigrated to America.
He married Keiko Fujimoto, a Japanese artist, but the couple split through a divorce in 2002. It was around this time when he met Elizabeth Holmes, who was looking for someone to run her start-up, Theranos. Elizabeth was just 18 when she met 37-year-old Balwani, who had just made millions by selling his software company.
According to the BBC, while Holmes was the face of the company, Balwani was the businessman serving as the president and chief operating officer.
Balwani’s name was dragged into the case after Elizabeth was found guilty of fraud in January this year. She accused her ex-boyfriend of abuse and coercive control. Balwani has always denied the charges.
Balwani had no knowledge of diagnostics and his background was not even in science. People close to him described him as gruff, and no-nonsense.
“He comes across as a very tough boss,” Reed Kathrein, a lawyer who represented investors after they lost money in Theranos, told the BBC.
Emails accessed by victims’ lawyers showed Balwani was nothing less than a bully, who controlled everything.
The company continued to grow with big Silicon Valley investors pumping in billions into Theranos. However, her downfall started in 2015 after an investigative report by Wall Street Journal revealed that Holmes had lied to her investors and her blood-testing technology did not work.
Elizabeth’s lawyers held Balwani responsible for the fraud and accused him of emotional and sexual abuse.