Whistleblower News From The Inside -- October 5, 2016
By the C|C Whistleblower Lawyer Team
Concert promoter sentenced to 18 years for $200m fraud – The owner of concert promotion company Worldwide Entertainment operated it as a Ponzi scheme with no real profits despite thousands of concerts by acts including Tina Turner, Aerosmith, David Bowe, Elton John and Britney Spears. Prosecutors said the owner was simply paying older investors with money from newer ones, all the while sending out statements from 1995 to 2006 falsely indicating they were getting double-digit returns. CBS
Yavapai Regional Medical Center to pay $5.85m to resolve whistleblower case – The government alleged that between 2006 and 2009, Yavapai misreported the hours worked by its employees, which inflated the wage index for the Prescott, Arizona area. The artificially inflated wage index was then allegedly used by the Medicare program when it calculated the amount of the payments it made to Yavapai and that, as a result, health care programs paid substantially more than was warranted. DOJ
Ex-prosecutor gets big settlement in battle against Christie — A former Hunterdon County assistant prosecutor who claims he was fired for alleging that Gov. Chris Christie’s administration dismissed an indictment because it involved supporters of the governor has received a $1.5 million settlement from the state in his whistleblower lawsuit. NJ.com
MoD withdraws attempt to strike out whistleblower’s claim — The Ministry of Defence has withdrawn its attempt to strike out a whistleblowing claim brought by a doctor who raised concerns about alleged discrepancies in the dispensing of strong painkillers at an army base where he was working. Dr. Stephen Frost, a civilian doctor who had worked with the military for 20 years, was dismissed three years ago by text and email while on a family holiday. The Guardian
Yahoo built a secret program to scan customer emails — Yahoo apparently built a custom software program to search all of its customers’ incoming emails for specific information provided by U.S. intelligence officials in 2015. The company complied with a classified U.S. government directive, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI. Yahoo