Epress.am News from Armenia
An Armenian man will spend six years in federal prison for his part in a Charleston-based Medicare fraud scheme that threatened to cost the US government more than $4 million in false healthcare claims, The Charleston Gazette reports.
On Tuesday, US District Judge John T. Copenhaver sentenced Sargis Tadevosyan, 42, to six years in prison on counts of aggravated identity theft and conspiracy to commit healthcare fraud.
During a weeklong trial in November, prosecutors said Tadevosyan supplied two Russian immigrants with fake identification documents and drove them from New York to Charleston to make a change to a bank account affiliated with one of six fake healthcare clinics around town.
A man authorities know only as “Garik” is suspected of setting up the fake clinics and lodging hundreds of false Medicare claims. A healthcare provider flagged the claims and brought them to the attention of US Department of Health and Human Services investigators before they were processed.
Garik gave Tadevosyan a set of keys so he could collect mail from each of the fake offices while he was in Charleston, prosecutors said.
Just before sentencing Monday, Tadevosyan, with the help of an interpreter, told Copenhaver that his wife was diagnosed with cancer on Sunday. Tadevosyan’s lawyers also asked the judge to consider that Tadevosyan was roped into the fraud scheme after escaping from Armenia, which was submerged in ethnic strife.
Tadevosyan spoke to the judge briefly.
“He thinks he let them down, his family,” Tadevosyan’s interpreter said to the judge as Tadevosyan muttered into his ear. “He cannot speak anymore, he is being very sorry.”
Tadevosyan’s lawyers, Ashley Craig, Rico Moore and Tony Mirvis, argued that Tadevosyan played a minimal role in the fraud scheme. The government had little evidence that Tadevosyan did anything more than simply drive his alleged Russian accomplices from New York to Charleston, the lawyers said, and only tenuously connected Tadevosyan’s relationship to Garik by showing the jury pictures found in the back of Tadevosyan’s car that depicted the two men at a dinner party. A federal agent admitted during trial that Tadevosyan’s name did not appear anywhere in the investigation prior to his arrest.
Igor Shevchuk and Arsen Bedzhanyan (the men Tadevosyan drove to Charleston) each pleaded guilty to their roles in the crime and each received 18-month prison sentences. In exchange for the plea, the men agreed to testify against Tadevosyan.
Defense attorneys accused Bedzhanyan and Shevchuk of lying to investigators in order to use Tadevosyan as a scapegoat.
“Today’s sentence is likely the longest sentence ever handed down in a healthcare fraud case in West Virginia,” US Attorney Booth Goodwin said in a statement, “and this case underscores my office’s commitment to protect our healthcare system by vigorously pursuing the criminals who attempt to steal from it.”