A federal judge in Illinois has denied a former Chicago hospital CFO’s request to dismiss fraud charges against him, even as a pair of co-defendants have had their charges dropped.
In a Friday ruling, Sharon Johnson Coleman, a judge in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, turned down the request by Anosh Ahmed, the former finance chief and chief operating officer of Loretto Hospital in Chicago. Ahmed’s attorneys earlier this month had asked for an evidentiary hearing to determine if his charges could be dropped due to alleged grand jury misconduct.
Federal prosecutors in 2024 had accused Ahmed of orchestrating a scheme to “submit more than $800 million in false claims” to the government for COVID-19 tests. Two other co-defendants in the case have had their charges permanently dismissed, according to the Chicago Tribune.
The request to dismiss Ahmed’s case comes in the wake of alleged misconduct by former Assistant U.S. Attorney Sheri Mecklenburg, who brought the case against him and three other co-defendants. Mecklenburg was terminated from her role in the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee after allegations of wrongdoing surfaced in a case against six people protesting a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Broadview, Illinois.
According to the Chicago Tribune, Mecklenburg allegedly had “improper contact” with two grand jurors outside official proceedings. She went on to record such instances as “mea culpa,” according to the newspaper.
Ahmed’s attorneys pointed to that case and others in their request for an evidentiary hearing.
“The Government’s actions in each of these matters reflect a pattern: the Government will wait to take any action until it faces the threat of having to publicly address, in an evidentiary hearing or otherwise, its misconduct in the grand jury proceedings,” they wrote in their July 6 request.
Ahmed, who left the U.S. before charges against him were announced, is currently being held in a jail in Belgrade, Serbia. In her response on Friday, Coleman acknowledged the “severity of the government’s misconduct," but noted that Ahmed has so far “refused to return (to the U.S.) on his own accord after becoming aware of the charges against him.”
Ahmed, Coleman wrote, is “seeking the benefits of a justice system he is actively refusing to be prosecuted in.”
“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.
If Ahmed returns to the U.S., he can renew his “motion to dismiss the indictment on prosecutorial misconduct grounds,” Coleman noted in the ruling.
