An ex-Loretto Hospital executive fighting extradition from Serbia is not entitled to a hearing on dismissal of fraud charges despite alleged misconduct by the U.S. attorney’s office that came to light in the “Broadview Six” case, a judge ruled Thursday.
U.S. District Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman said in her 11-page ruling that despite the “severity of the government’s misconduct,” Anosh Ahmed, the hospital’s onetime chief operating officer, has “refused to submit” to the jurisdiction of her court, even though he’s likely been aware for years of charges against him in Chicago in two separate cases.
“Ahmed’s assertion that he resides in a Serbian jail based on a tainted indictment, is unsupported, because he was arrested based on two warrants…and because he continues to fight the very extradition that would take him out of the Serbian government’s custody,” Coleman wrote.
The judge said granting Ahmed’s request would give him “the benefits of a justice system he is actively refusing to be prosecuted in.” She also said he’s not entitled to grand jury transcripts or other discovery in the case because he has not been arraigned and a protective order on the evidence could not be enforced overseas.
Coleman said Ahmed would be allowed to renew his motion to dismiss on prosecutorial misconduct grounds should he return to Chicago to face the charges.
The ruling comes more than a month after prosecutors moved to permanently dismiss all charges against two of Ahmed’s co-defendants who were challenging their indictment in a massive, $800 million COVID-19 testing fraud scheme that was secured by the same federal prosecutor who handled the “Broadview Six” case.
A third co-defendant, Mohamed Sirajudeen, did not join in the motion to dismiss and his charges remain pending.
Meanwhile, Ahmed remains charged in a separate case involving fraud at Loretto Hospital itself that also has been significantly weakened by the allegations of grand jury misconduct.
Earlier this month, the U.S. attorney’s office said they planned to go to a new grand jury and reindict the Loretto defendants to eliminate any taint.
On Tuesday, however, it was announced that one of the defendants, Heather Bergdahl, a close friend of Ahmed’s, has entered into a deferred prosecution deal that will likely leave her without a felony conviction. Bergdahl admitted to certain conduct as part of the deal with the U.S. attorney’s office, but it remained sealed Tuesday for unexplained reasons.
A similar deal was also being finalized for former Loretto CEO George Miller, prosecutors have said. A third defendant, medical supply executive Sameer Suhail, was also in “negotiations” with the government to resolve his charges short of trial, according to court records.
The group was accused of embezzling at least $15 million from the West Side safety net hospital over a five-year period, including at the height of the COVID-19 crisis, by causing payments to vendor companies for purported goods and services that they knew had not been provided.
Both Ahmed and Suhail were living in Dubai by the time the charges came down. Suhail returned to the U.S. earlier this year and has pleaded not guilty.
Ahmed, meanwhile, was arrested on Nov. 30 in Belgrade, Serbia, and has been held in a jail there as he fights extradition.
Both cases were led by Assistant U.S. Attorney Sheri Mecklenburg, who had been on assignment with the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee but was terminated after the allegations of wrongdoing in the “Broadview Six” case came to light in May.
According to records made public in that case, Mecklenburg improperly “vouched” for the case against a group of Democratic political operatives and one garden store worker who were protesting at the west suburban Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing center at the height of Operation Midway Blitz.
Among other alleged gaffes, Mecklenburg reportedly told skeptical grand jurors she would “never” ask them to charge anyone if she didn’t think there was probable cause. She also had improper contact with two grand jurors outside the official proceedings that she later had to put on the record as a “mea culpa,” the transcripts showed.
Similar misconduct was alleged in the COVID-19 fraud case against Ahmed. According to defense filings in that case, Mecklenburg engaged in improper vouching, disclosure of off-the-record negotiations with a defense attorney and “inflammatory characterizations of the defendants, including name-calling and folk-wisdom metaphors.”
Coleman had ordered an evidentiary hearing into those allegations, but it was called off after U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros’ office dismissed charges against two defendants, Mahmood Sami Kahn and Suhaib Ahmad Chaudhry, who were both accused of playing relatively minor roles in the scheme.
jmeisner@chicagotribune.com
