Whistleblower News From The Inside -- April 24, 2017

By the C|C Whistleblower Lawyer Team

Feds Say KBR Wants Too Much Discovery In $150M FCA Spat — Kellogg Brown & Root Services again went too far with discovery requests in defending a $150 million False Claims Act suit, according to the federal government, which told an Illinois federal judge Thursday the company’s data requests only serve to burden the government. Federal prosecutors claim that the requests, and a motion to compel production filed earlier this month, ignore previous rulings in the case that found KBR’s discovery demands excessive. Law360

SEC Cracking Down on Ponzi Schemes — On April 14, 2017, a federal judge granted a bid by the SEC to force former head fund manager Francisco Illarramendi to pay nearly $27 million for his role in a Ponzi scheme. According to the court’s order, Illarramendi was the mastermind behind an elaborate five-year scheme to cover up a $5 million investment loss. Rather than disclosing this loss to investors, Illarramendi tried to “raise as much money as possible to be able to make it so that the gains from . . . the additional money would eventually cover the loss.” Illarramendi’s sheme was unsuccessfully and only served to increase the amount of mismanagement between assets and liabilities to approximately $30 million. National Law Review

At Science March, Flint Whistleblower Warns More Crises to Come if Trump Gets His Way — Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, the pediatrician who blew the whistle on the lead crisis in Flint, Michigan, was among the thousands who converged on Washington, D.C. on Saturday to rally in support of science and against what many see as an attack on the scientific community by the Trump administration.

In an interview with The Huffington Post at the March For Science, Hanna-Attisha warned that the direction the Trump administration is taking the country will likely come with serious consequences. Huffington Post