It would be quite easy to write a feminist critique of the guilty verdict on conspiracy and wire fraud charges against Elizabeth Holmes, the founder and CEO of Theranos. The jury’s decision seems particularly harsh, considering that the main victims here are the bruised egos of the foolish investors who fell for Holmes’s incredible deception. Borrowing from her business pitch, a drop of common sense could have spared them this embarrassment, but greed is eternal, and Holmes knew how to capitalize on it. Still, facing up to 20 years for each of the four charges seems an extreme punishment, especially when compared to the lenient treatment received by the Sackler family.
It could be argued that Holmes wouldn’t be in this predicament if it weren’t for John Carreyrou, a reporter from the Wall Street Journal, who, upon hearing Theranos’s impossible claims, reached the only logical conclusion: a drop of blood is not sufficient for myriad tests. The entire business case of Theranos was built on that lie. It challenges the belief that Holmes not only managed to uphold that lie for many years but also raised hundreds of millions of dollars from “informed” investors, brought big names onto the Theranos board, and turned them into advocates for a supposed unicorn based on something as fragile as a drop of blood.
On the other hand, the United States is the land that put Donald Trump in the White House and could bring him back. It’s the place where Jeffrey Epstein managed to maintain a sex trafficking/child abuse scheme for decades. The country of Bernie Madoff is also the one whose Attorney General interferes in ongoing criminal investigations at the behest of lobbyists like Rudy Giuliani. If the money and connections are right, there’s little that can’t be done in the Land of the Free.
This site found remarkable parallels between Holmes’s tactics and those of a well-known criminal group: Derwick Associates. When we heard that David Boies and Peter Fritsch threatened Carreyrou from the Wall Street Journal on behalf of Theranos, we immediately recalled a similar episode in Caracas, where Fritsch and Adam Kaufmann attempted to do the same with José de Córdoba and Kejal Vivas, two Wall Street Journal reporters working on an expose of Derwick Associates.
Reportedly, Theranos raised around $1.3 billion from investors. This is roughly the cost that Derwick Associates paid to a U.S. company (ProEnergy Services) to supply second-hand generators, which were then sold to various Venezuelan institutions at a markup of $1 billion. Theranos’s fundraising is also similar to a $1.2 billion money laundering scheme (Operation Money Flight) involving Francisco Convit and Alejandro Betancourt (directors of Derwick Associates). Convit and Betancourt are involved in a separate $4.25 billion money laundering scheme.
Holmes’s ability to create a network of powerful allies based on a lie is impressive, although justice ultimately caught up with her. Now imagine a criminal group, not from Stanford or Silicon Valley, mind you, but from Caracas, whose capabilities are so extraordinary that they are considered a “national security issue,” not for Venezuela but for the U.S.!
Convit has been placed on fugitive status by the Department of Justice for his role in Money Flight. However, Betancourt, despite being the co-conspirator number 2 in Money Flight, lives in London, right next to Jacob Rees-Mogg, head of the UK Parliament and a senior official in Boris Johnson’s government. Neither the UK nor the U.S. seems in a hurry to prosecute Betancourt. In fact, sources familiar with the Department of Justice investigations assert that Betancourt cut an immunity deal similar to Epstein’s. This arrangement stands in stark contrast to Holmes’s guilty verdict, given the scale of Betancourt’s criminality and his known associations with Russia’s FSB. It seems that, for American juries, some are more guilty than others.