A fraud and kickback case against former Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare executives John Holland and William Moore, and co-defendant Edmundo Cota will proceed to trial after federal prosecutors won the right to use statements from 10 alleged co-conspirators, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported Sept. 30.
The case, now 10 years old, was stalled while the Department of Justice appealed an Atlanta judge's ruling that prevented prosecutors from using out-of-court statements, according to the report. But on Sept. 25, a federal appeals court in Atlanta overturned the ruling, allowing prosecutors to move forward with the evidence.
The initial ruling of the statements as evidence was made in November 2022, when U.S. District Judge Amy Totenburg said that the prosecutors couldn't present co-conspirator statements to a jury without first showing the defendants knowingly violated the federal anti-kickback statute. In 2014, Ms. Totenburg had previously accepted the guilty plea of Tracey Cota, who helped her then-husband, co-defendant Mr. Cota, run medical clinics for predominantly undocumented Hispanic women.
The case, first brought against Mr. Holland in February 2017, was previously set to go to trial in April 2023, but a new date has yet to be set. Prosecutors allege that Mr. Holland, Mr. Moore and Mr. Cota arranged a multimillion-dollar kickback scheme to have patients of Clinica de la Mama, run by Mr. and Ms. Cota, referred to Tenet hospitals in Georgia and South Carolina.
The alleged kickbacks amounted to at least $400 million in fraudulent billing of federal healthcare programs and the fraudulent receipt of at least $127 in claims. Prosecutors allege that Tenet, through Mr. Holland and Mr. Moore, paid more than $12 million in bribes to Clinica de la Mama.