Former NY Hospital Employees and Telco Company Plead Guilty to Bid Rigging
The Department of Justice announced that Anthony Spadola, a former IT manager at Mount Sinai Hospital, pleaded guilty today in U.S. District Court in Manhattan to one count of conspiracy to rig bids and allocate contracts for the supply of telecommunications equipment and services to Mount Sinai from approximately January 2001 through October 2004. He also pleaded guilty to other charges including mail fraud and tax evasion. Stephen Cogliano, another former Mount Sinai employee, conspired with Spadola to get kickbacks from telecommunications installation company Broadcom Voice & Data Inc. and pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to rig bids and allocate contracts, as did Broadcom.
According to the DOJ “[b]etween January 2001 and September 2003, Broadcom paid Spadola and Cogliano a total of approximately $154,000 in kickbacks in order to ensure that Broadcom would be allocated a portion of Mount Sinai’s total contracts for purchasing telecommunications equipment and services and that no alternative vendors would be chosen for those contracts. The kickback money was paid through checks issued by Broadcom to the sham consulting companies created by Spadola and Cogliano.”
Spadola is scheduled to be sentenced before Judge McKenna on Jan. 8, 2007, and Cogliano is scheduled to be sentenced before Judge Rakoff on Jan. 25, 2007. Broadcom is scheduled to be sentenced before Judge Swain on Dec. 28, 2006. The bid rigging charge - the most severe of the three charges in this case - is a violation of the Sherman Act and carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison, three years of supervised release, and a $1 million fine for an individual, and a maximum penalty of a fine of $100 million and a term of probation of five years for a corporation.
September 29, 2006 Related topics: Legal & legislative, Ethics & Scandals, Policies & Procedures