August 22, 2023

August 22, 2023

Zeaborn Ship Management (Singapore) PTE. LTD., Chief Engineer Constancio Estuye, and Captain Alexander Parreno have pleaded guilty and agreed to pay $2 million in civil penalties for dumping over 7,500 gallons of unprocessed oily bilge water overboard their ship, the Star Maia, in 2022, in violation of the Act to Prevent Pollution from Ships.  Additionally, the defendants admitted that during the same time period, they also burned garbage in barrels...

August 21, 2023

To resolve criminal charges of colluding to fix prices, mainly on a cholesterol medicine called pravastatin, Teva Pharmaceuticals USA, Inc. has agreed to pay a $225 million criminal penalty and donate $50 million in drugs to humanitarian organizations, while Glenmark Pharmaceuticals Inc., USA has agreed to pay $30 million criminal penalty.  The drugs that Teva has been ordered to donate, clotrimazole and tobramycin, were also part of the price fixing...

August 18, 2023

A doctor who defrauded California’s Medicaid program of over $20 million has been sentenced to 5 years in jail, ordered to pay $2.3 million in restitution, and forced to surrender his medical license.  Mohamed Waddah El-Nachef had pleaded guilty to prescribing medically unnecessary anti-psychotics, HIV medications, and opioids to over a thousand Medi-Cal beneficiaries, many of whom then sold the drugs for cash.  CA AG

August 18, 2023

The owner and operator of Georgia-based LabSolutions LLC has been sentenced to 27 years in prison for submitting over $463 million in medically unnecessary genetic and other laboratory tests derived from illegal kickbacks.  Minal Patel allegedly paid kickbacks to telemarketing companies to talk Medicare beneficiaries into getting the tests, then paid kickbacks to telemedicine doctors who signed orders for the tests without ever speaking to beneficiaries to determine need.  As...

The Antitrust Week In Review

Here are some of the developments in antitrust news this past week that we found interesting and are following.   Hospital sues data analytics company MultiPlan in US court antitrust case.  Nonprofit hospital system AdventHealth has sued data analytics company MultiPlan in U.S. court, accusing it of leading a price-fixing conspiracy that underpaid healthcare providers billions of dollars for out-of-network reimbursements from major insurers. Florida-based AdventHealth, which operates 50 hospitals...

SEC Awards $104 Million to Seven Whistleblowers

Earlier this month (August 4), the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced its award of $104 million to seven whistleblowers "whose information and assistance led to a successful SEC enforcement action and related actions brought by another agency."  It follows a string of blockbuster awards under the SEC Whistleblower Program, which provides whistleblowers who provide information leading to a successful government enforcement action up to 30% of any government recovery. ...

August 14, 2023

UBS AG has agreed to pay $1.4 billion to settle a DOJ investigation alleging the financial institution and its U.S.-based affiliates defrauded investors by making false and misleading statements regarding its residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS), which it knew largely did not hold up to loan underwriting guidelines and consumer protection laws.  During the 2008 financial crisis, 40 RMBS that UBS issued in 2006 and 2007 ultimately tanked, causing substantial losses...

August 10, 2023

Crypto asset trading platform Bittrex Inc. and its co-founder and former CEO, William Shihara, has agreed to pay $24 million in civil penalties, disgorgement, and prejudgment interest to settle charges of acting as an unregistered broker, exchange, and clearing agency, in violation of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.  According to the SEC, Bittrex had actively avoided government regulation by directing token issuers to scrub their public statements of certain...

August 10, 2023

Colombian financial services institution Corporación Financiera Colombiana S.A. (Corficolombiana) has agreed to pay over $80 million to resolve foreign bribery investigations by criminal, civil, and administrative authorities in the United States and Colombia.  Between 2012 and 2015, Corficolombiana allegedly conspired with Brazilian-based construction conglomerate Odebrecht S.A. (Odebrecht) to offer and pay more than $20 million in bribes to Colombian government officials in order to win rights to construct and operate...

August 10, 2023

Redman Services Inc. and owner Jerry Lee Redman pleaded guilty to underreporting the business’s gross receipts on its corporate income tax returns and underreported his income on his personal income tax return, for at least 2015 through 2018. Redman caused customers to write checks to him personally, rather than to RSI, but did not include the checks in RSI’s gross receipts. RSI’s funds were withdrawn to cover personal expenses but...