Convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes and her Theranos co-founder must repay $125m (£100m) to Rupert Murdoch as part of restitution for their crime, a judge has ordered.
Ms Holmes, 39, and her ex-boyfriend and business partner, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, must hand the sum over as part of court-ordered $452m restitution. The money will go to investors who the pair deceived into backing Ms Holmes’ tech startup, Theranos.
Mr Murdoch, 92, invested a reported $100m in the company between 2014 and 2015 while its valuation and prominence was soaring.
Other high-profile figures including Henry Kissinger and Bill Clinton also backed Ms Holmes’s startup.
The sum Ms Holmes and Mr Balwani have been told to repay Mr Murdoch is the single largest part of the restitution order.
Lawyers for Ms Holmes and Mr Balwani have previously argued the pair have very little money and it is unclear whether they will ever be able to repay the full $425m.
The restitution order was handed down as a judge refused Ms Holmes’ request to remain free while she appeals her 11-year prison sentence for fraud. Ms Holmes has argued that her original trial was unfair.
Judges from the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals denied the bid to stay out of prison on Tuesday.
Theranos was once one of Silicon Valley’s most feted startups, valued at more than $9bn at the peak of its success.
The biotech company, which Ms Holmes founded when she was 19, promised to deliver revolutionary technology that would detect hundreds of diseases and other ailments from just a few drops of blood.
Ms Holmes, who becameknown for wearing Steve Jobs-style black turtleneck sweaters, claimed to be a self-made billionaire by the age of 30.
However, the company spectacularly collapsed amid claims of fraud. A series of reports by the Wall Street Journal, a newspaper owned by Mr Murdoch, exposed how bosses were secretly sending blood tests to traditional laboratories instead of using Theranos’ signature blood-testing machines.
Mr Murdoch is said to have subsequently emailed the Wall Street Journal calling himself “one of a bunch of old men taken in by a seemingly great young woman,” the New York Times reported.
As part of the restitution order, Ms Holmes and Mr Balwani must also hand back $40m to pharmacy chain Walgreens, which invested in Theranos in 2013 after agreeing to provide its blood testing kits across some of its 9,000 US stores.
Another $14.5m is owed to supermarket giant Safeway, which had also agreed to be a Theranos business partner before ultimately backing out.
Ms Holmes was sentenced to 11 years in prison for the scandal in November last year. Mr Balwani was sentenced to almost 13 years in jail.
In her first interview since the scandal broke in 2016, Ms Holmes told the New York Times earlier this year she had been “playing a character I created”.
She said: “I believed it would be how I would be good at business and taken seriously and not taken as a little girl or a girl who didn’t have good technical ideas.”
