Skip to main content

%1

Key Theranos Witness Tied by Holmes to Other Troubled Labs

Submitted by jhartgen@abi.org on

A former Theranos Inc. lab director who was the primary source for media reporting that took down the company came under fire from Elizabeth Holmes’s lawyers over his work for another medical startup that fell into scandal, Bloomberg News reported. Adam Rosendorff, a medical doctor who testified as a government witness at Holmes’s fraud trial that he quit the blood-testing startup in disgust, went on to serve as a lab director at uBiome Inc. -- which collapsed in a morass of insolvency, regulatory probes and criminal charges, similar to Theranos. Lance Wade, an attorney for Holmes, called Rosendorff “incompetent” and said in court Tuesday he wants to question the witness about his work after he resigned from Theranos at three other labs that had records of deficiencies. U.S. District Judge Edward Davila said he has “qualms” about allowing that line of cross-examination and will make a decision later in the day. Wade said the same regulators who have aided prosecutors in the Holmes case are evaluating Rosendorff’s work after he left Theranos, adding that Rosendorff initially hid his employment at uBiome from federal investigators. He also worked at Invitae and is now employed by PerkinElmer.

Senator Warren Asks SEC to Probe Trading by Fed Policymakers

Submitted by jhartgen@abi.org on

Senator Elizabeth Warren on Monday called on the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate trading by top U.S. central bankers, including that of two Fed bank presidents who resigned after public outcry over their transactions, Reuters reported. In a letter to SEC Chair Gary Gensler, Warren also cited trading by Fed Vice Chair Richard Clarida in February 2020, shortly before Fed Chair Jerome Powell issued a warning about risks from the coronavirus and pledged a Fed response if needed. "The reports of this financial activity by Fed officials raise serious questions about possible conflicts of interest and reveal a disregard for the public trust," Warren wrote in the letter, released publicly. "If these trades were based on Fed officials’ knowledge of non-public, market moving information, they may have represented potentially illegal activity." The Fed launched its own review of ethics and trading rules last month after disclosures that Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren had traded real-estate securities and Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan had traded millions of dollars of individual stocks last year even as the Fed undertook a rescue of the U.S. economy and financial markets with massive purchases of Treasuries and housing-backed bonds. Both said they had followed the Fed's trading rules. Rosengren left his job last week, citing a kidney condition. Kaplan is due to leave on Friday.

Fed Ethics Questions Spread to Barkin on McKinsey’s Opioid Role

Submitted by jhartgen@abi.org on

Amid a trading scandal that’s forced two regional Federal Reserve bank presidents to resign and raised questions about governance at the U.S. central bank, a public advocacy group has aired concerns about a third regional chief and the job he held before joining the Fed, Bloomberg News reported. In a report titled, “The Other Ethics Issues at the Fed Regional Banks,” the Center for Economic Policy and Research took aim at Richmond Fed President Thomas Barkin for his past roles at McKinsey & Co. Barkin held several senior posts at the global consulting firm, including six years as chief financial officer and three years as chief risk officer. The report highlights McKinsey’s history of advising Purdue Pharma LP on how to maximize sales of its painkiller OxyContin, central to a U.S. opioid epidemic that’s cost hundreds of thousands of lives. That led to significant financial and reputational damage to McKinsey after it became the target of lawsuits from all 50 states. Earlier this year it agreed to pay more than $600 million to settle them. There is no evidence that Barkin had any direct involvement in the advisory work with Purdue, but he has declined to answer detailed questions about what his senior roles did involve in terms of supervising McKinsey’s engagement with the drugmaker.