Former executive at Theranos receives harsher prison sentence than Elizabeth Holmes

A judge sentenced former Theranos president and COO Ramesh Balwani to nearly 13 years in prison Wednesday for fraud offenses related to the company, according to BBC News, a sentence longer than its founder and former CEO Elizabeth Holmes recently received.

Balwani, who had a romantic relationship with Holmes, was convicted over the summer of 12 counts of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud after misleading investors about Theranos’ financial state, NBC News reported. Holmes was sentenced to 11 years and three months imprisonment on Nov. 18 for four fraud counts, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Holmes founded Theranos in 2003 and claimed the company’s blood testing technology would be able to detect hundreds of diseases from small blood samples and allow for testing outside laboratories. A powerful Theranos investor sued for fraud in 2016 after the company was exposed for using traditional testing equipment to process most of its samples.

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