NEW YORK – The US Attorney's Office for the Western District of Pennsylvania said on Monday that Ravitej Reddy, the owner of two laboratories in the Pittsburgh area, has been sentenced in federal court to 18 months in prison.
Additionally, he was ordered to forfeit $9 million in criminal proceeds and pay more than $77 million in restitution for conspiring to pay illegal kickbacks for laboratory tests.
Reddy was originally charged in 2019 for his role in a kickback scheme for cancer genomic and pharmacogenomic testing in which he acquired thousands of testing samples and corresponding prescriptions from Medicare beneficiaries. The samples were sent to the labs owned by Reddy, Personalized Genomics and Med Health Services Management, by contract physicians even though they had not conducted adequate visits or weren't treating the patients for cancer and weren't qualified to interpret the test results, according to the attorney's office at the time.
Reddy then submitted claims with his labs as the billing labs although they didn’t have properly validated equipment to conduct cancer genomic testing, the attorney's office also alleged in 2019.
In early 2020, Reddy pleaded guilty to three conspiracy counts and one substantive count related to the payment and receipt of illegal kickbacks.
According to the attorney's office, Reddy and others caused a loss to the US of more than $60 million.