Investigators say his fingerprints are all over financial crimes at Theranos. Why is he a virtual ghost?

Fallen wunderkind Elizabeth Holmes is the face of the Theranos scandal. But the next act of Silicon Valley’s biggest blow-up rests on a mysterious tech entrepreneur with almost no digital footprint.

Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani is a virtual ghost — despite serving nearly seven years in the No. 2 position at the blood-testing startup that turned out to be too good to be true. While the black-turtleneck-clad Holmes graced magazine covers and spoke before adoring crowds, Balwani, her former boyfriend, stayed in the shadows. He has almost no internet presence, and the only verifiable photo that STAT could find of him was a grainy image from his 1988 college yearbook.

Now, he’s at the center of a legal showdown that could tear open a new chapter in a scandal that has rocked the business world and captivated the public imagination. And it could set up a daytime-TV legal defense: My ex-girlfriend duped me.

Balwani, 52, is accused of a massive fraud, bilking investors out of more than $700 million and lying repeatedly about what Theranos’s blood-testing technology could actually do. The 34-year-old Holmes, accused of nearly identical crimes, settled last week with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Theranos did, too.

But Balwani didn’t, and