Anosh Ahmed, formerly the CFO of Loretto Hospital from 2018-2021, has been charged with 11 counts of federal wire fraud. He is charged alongside the hospital’s former chief transformation officer, Heather Bergdahl, and Sameer Suhail, the former CEO of medical supply company Foresight Health and a personal friend of Ahmed. The trio faces 14 counts of wire fraud, with a maximum sentence of 20 years for each count.
Loretto Hospital is a small, 122-bed hospital that operates on the West Side of Chicago. According to ProPublica, the hospital had nearly $84M in revenue in 2023.
According to the superseding indictment returned in Chicago’s U.S. District Court, Ahmed allegedly conspired with Bergdahl and Suhail to control millions of dollars of hospital finances via bogus companies and multiple wire transfers.
Over three years, payments were wired to companies with generic medical supply names with no business dealings with the hospital. These companies, with names like “Elite Medical Personnels” and “Maximum Healthcare Solutions,” were under the direct control of Ahmed and Suhail.
Investigators also found evidence of payments totaling nearly half a million dollars being made to Bergdahl from accounts belonging to these companies owned by Ahmed.
Ahmed resigned from his role at Loretto in 2021 following a scandal involving supplying well-connected people with COVID-19 vaccinations they were not eligible for when the shots were in short supply. Under his tenure as COO and CFO during the height of the pandemic’s uncertainty, Loretto held vaccination events at high-end watch dealers, steakhouses and the Trump Tower in Chicago.
This scandal resulted in the hospital’s supply of COVID-19 vaccines being temporarily cut off in March of 2021. During this time, it is alleged that Ahmed bragged to people that one of the recipients of these vaccines was Eric Trump.
Bergdahl left the hospital in 2022 and took a position as a CFO at a company Anosh Inc., an “alternative investment firm” owned by Ahmed that claims to have approximately $140 billion of assets under management on a website littered with ambiguity and typos.
Bergdahl was the first of the three to be officially charged after she was snagged off a Dubai-bound plane in early May by federal agents. She was taken in on a federal complaint, not an indictment, a strategy used by federal agents when a quick arrest is needed or to temporarily halt a fleeing suspect.
Presumably in an attempt to clean up his online image during this case, Ahmed published a press release on Tuesday highlighting his charitable impact in 2023. Arraignment dates for the case are pending.
Failure of financial controls
There appear to be multiple failures of controls in this case:
- Bergdahl and Ahmed had complete control of the finances without oversight. When Ahmed took over the CFO role in July 2018, it appeared as if he and Bergdahl were the only ones with access to the company’s bank accounts and accounts payable.
- Despite a poor financial situation, Ahmed was able to establish financial control early on by taking the CFO role after being COO. This allegedly allowed him to involve his personal friend, Suhail, in the scheme.
- The hospital’s leadership failed to detect Ahmed’s influence on the finances after his departure.
- Despite a detailed compliance plan, the hospital failed to have any legitimate internal audits during and after Ahmed’s tenure that could have identified the fraudulent payments.
