SAN JOSE, CA  (TIP): Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, a former high-ranking executive at Theranos, was convicted of fraud Thursday, July 7,  for misleading investors about the financial health of the now-defunct health care startup. Balwani, who was convicted on all 12 counts of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud, was president and chief operating officer of Theranos, a blood-testing company that claimed its technology could detect a multitude of diseases with just a few drops of a patient’s blood. Balwani and the company was accused of defrauding investors and patients, in part by misrepresenting the efficacy of Theranos’ product and lying about the company’s finances. Balwani began working at Theranos in 2009 while he and founder Elizabeth Holmes, his alleged co-conspirator, were secretly dating. Holmes was convicted in January on four of 11 counts of fraud. Each count carries a potential maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. Holmes is awaiting sentencing. In May, she asked a judge to toss out her conviction.

Holmes’ attorneys in her trial accused Balwani of misleading investors and lying about how much money the company was making. Prosecutors accused Balwani of overstating Theranos’ revenues while pitching investors for new cash infusions for the company. Balwani’s lawyers took the same stance against Holmes, accusing her of controlling all aspects of the business at Theranos, including allegedly providing false data on its blood-testing technology. Ramesh Balwani was born in Pakistan to a Sindhi upper middle-class farming family. He attended Aitchison College, a prestigious boarding school in Lahore. He stayed there until 1984, receiving an education the British colonialists had designated for “youths of good family.” Balwani speaks Urdu, Hindi and English. The family eventually moved to India “because being a Hindu in a mostly all-Muslim country of Pakistan was very difficult” according to Balwani’s personal lawyer. Later they immigrated to the United States. In the Spring 1987 semester, Balwani began undergraduate studies at the University of Texas at Austin as an international student where he was a member of the Pakistani Students Association. “He was very patriotically Pakistani,” said one friend of Balwani’s at the time, “He was one of us.” Balwani left the campus sometime after 1991 to begin working; he would eventually complete a degree, but not until 1997 with a bachelor’s degree in information systems. In the 1990s, Balwani worked for Lotus Software and Microsoft. During Balwani’s tenure at Microsoft he worked in sales.[6] He claims to have written thousands of lines of code, however independent investigations could not verify this, and numerous Microsoft managers who were asked about him could not remember him. While at Microsoft, he met a Japanese artist, Keiko Fujimoto, who became his wife. In late 1999 he joined CommerceBid.com as President. It was a software development company that helped businesses buy and sell items via auctions over the burgeoning Internet. In 1999, the company was purchased by Commerce One, another business development software company with a high valuation. The buyout was done entirely with stock, and Balwani joined the board of the new company. In July 2000, Balwani sold his shares in Commerce One, netting nearly $40 million shortly before the company went out of business, just before the dot com bubble burst. He later went back to school and received a Master of Business Administration from the University of California, Berkeley in 2003. He spent another four years in a computer science graduate program at Stanford University but dropped out in 2008. While enrolled at Berkeley, Balwani, who was 37 at the time, met Elizabeth Holmes, who was 18 and in her senior year of high school. Holmes pursued an undergraduate degree in chemical engineering at Stanford, but later dropped out to focus full-time on Theranos.

(With inputs from DOJ and Wikipedia)