412 Charged in $1.3 Billion in Opioid Schemes

Posted on July 13, 2017July 13, 2017 by Denise Simon

U.S. charging 412 in health fraud, opioid schemes worth $1.3 billion

ChicagoTribune: More than 400 people have been charged with taking part in health care fraud and opioid scams that totaled $1.3 billion in false billing, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced Thursday.

Sessions called the collective action the “largest health care fraud takedown operation in American history” and said it indicates that some doctors, nurses and pharmacists “have chosen to violate their oaths and put greed ahead of their patients.”

Among those charged are six Michigan doctors accused of a scheme to prescribe unnecessary opioids. A Florida rehab facility is alleged to have recruited addicts with gift cards and visits to strip clubs, leading to $58 million in false treatments and tests.

In the Northern District of Illinois, 15 people were charged in six cases involving an alleged $12.7 million in billing fraud of private insurers and government programs. At least two Chicago-area physicians, nurses, chiropractors and at least one physical therapist were among those indicted. In the Southern District of Illinois, five people were charged in separate alleged schemes to defraud Medicaid.

Related:

Officials said those charged in the schemes include more than 120 people involved in illegally prescribing and distributing narcotic painkillers. Such prescription opioids are behind the deadliest drug overdose epidemic in U.S. history. More than 52,000 Americans died of overdoses in 2015 — a record — and experts believe the numbers have continued to rise.

“In some cases, we had addicts packed into standing-room-only waiting rooms waiting for these prescriptions,” acting FBI director Andrew McCabe said. “They are a death sentence, plain and simple.”

Nearly 300 health care providers are being suspended or banned from participating in federal health care programs, Sessions said.

“They seem oblivious to the disastrous consequences of their greed. Their actions not only enrich themselves, often at the expense of taxpayers, but also feed addictions and cause addictions to start,” Sessions said.

Health care fraud sweeps like Thursday’s happen each year across the country, but law enforcement officials continue to grapple over the best way to fight the problem.

The people charged were illegally billing Medicare, Medicaid and the health insurance program that serves members of the armed forces, retired service members and their families, the Justice Department said. The allegations include claims that those charged billed the programs for unnecessary drugs that were never purchased or given to the patients.

Inside an FBI opioid task force:

Natalia Veselnitskaya, Prevezon, Brooklyn, NY and Money Laundering

Posted on July 11, 2017July 11, 2017 by Denise Simon

Natalia Veselnitskaya had clients to defend in New York. Those clients were Denis Katsyv, Alexander Litvak, and Timofey Krit. Natalia had expensive choices in accommodations in New York where the U.S taxpayer paid the bill.

Prevezon Holdings was part of a money laundering prosecution case in Southern District of New York that for the most part was settled in May of 2017. Prevezon is/was owned by Denis Katsyv and has a principal by the name of Timofey Krit. The Prevezon office was located in Brooklyn, New York. The registered agent for Prevezon is Gabriella Volshteyn.

Gabriella Volshteyn is a founder and a managing attorney of Volshteyn & Associates. The lawfirm boasts the following on the website:

In our Real Estate practice, we have participated in over $1 billion of transactions in commercial and residential real estate involving both the US-based and international corporate entities and individuals.

In our Business and Contract Law practice, we have represented a full range of clients from individuals and small business owners to large multinational holding companies. We have drafted contracts ranging from simple corporate agreements to complex contractual agreements related to large-scale international events, such as Sochi Olympic Games.

In our Global Corporate and Tax practice, we have considerable expertise in structuring complex corporate, banking and investment accounts for foreign investors and the establishment of offshore trusts in tax-favored jurisdictions, such as the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, the Bahamas, the Netherlands, Antilles, the Channel Islands, Panama, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Madeira.

Our Surrogacy Law practice is an area of passion for this firm as we have been fortunate to help many families from all over the world with bringing a child in their lives. With the help of our firm, surrogacy has made the dream of having children possible for those who are infertile, unable to become pregnant, or unable to carry a child to term.

(of note, the countries listed above are those that are known to be quite common in use by front companies to hide money, evade taxes and park laundered funds)

*** While Donald Trump Jr. had a meeting on June 6, 2016 with Natalia Veselnitskaya, the meeting allegedly had several objectives including opposition intelligence on Hillary Clinton, getting waivers or removal of sanctions from the Magnitsky Act and later Russian adoption. Donald Jr. included Jared Kuschner and Paul Manafort in the meeting without vetting Natalia or on background the sanctions. Natalia also does have ties to former top members of GRU and FSB. As a normal practice, the Kremlin always dispatches operatives that are at least one layer removed from listed official positions of the Russian government.

A particular group of note for which Veselnitskaya was involved and is a large lobby operation in Washington DC is HRAGI, a front operation on human rights known as Human Rights Accountability Global Initiative Foundation. Those involved in the lobby operation on behalf of HRAGI and Prevezon include:

A. Rinat Akhmetshin – Russian national living in Washington D.C.
B. Robert Arakelian
C. Chris Cooper – CEO Potomac Square Group
D. Glenn Simpson – SNS Global and Fusion GPS
E. Mark Cymrot – Partner, Baker Hostetler
F. Ron Dellums – Former Republican Congressman (correction, Dellums is Democrat of operative status)
G. Howard Schweitzer – Managing Partner of Cozen O’Connor Public
Strategies

In more detail as published by Senator Grassley’s office:

The Russian Government also has a vested interested in ensuring that Prevezon
Holdings Limited and its affiliated companies successfully defend asset forfeiture
proceedings brought against them by the United States Government in New
York, in which Prevezon is accused of laundering proceeds of the $230 million
fraud.
Prevezon is owned by Denis Katsyv, the son of a Russian government official,
Piotr Katsyv. Denis Katsyv currently has $7million frozen by the Swiss General
Prosecutor, pursuant to a criminal investigation by the Swiss authorities into the
laundering of proceeds from the $230 million fraud. More here.

***

Another issue is Jared Kushner.

HRAGI’s other clients include Vladimir Lelyukh, a top executive at Sberbank Capital, a subsidiary of the state-owned Russian bank involved in the real estate, energy, transportation, and automotive sectors. Sberbank Capital’s CEO, Ashot Khachaturyants, is a former senior official in Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) and its Ministry of Economic Development and Trade.
State-owned Russian financial institutions are common conduits for surreptitious intelligence work in the country. Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, has faced scrutiny over a January meeting a top executive at another bank with ties to Russian intelligence, Moscow-based Vnesheconombank. For context and validation, go here.

Vnesheconombank was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury in 2014 due to Russian annexation of Crimea and Ukraine.

Vnesheconombank also known as VEB bank has the following officers:

Last year, the Justice Department said a man who pleaded guilty to spying for the Russian government entered the country posing as an employee of VEB. VEB, incidentally, paid his legal fees.

In December, President Trump’s son-in-law and presidential adviser Jared Kushner met VEB’s Chairman in New York.

And last month, The Wall Street Journal reported that VEB helped fund construction of the president’s 65-story Trump International Hotel and Tower in Toronto. The Russian entity bought $850 million of stock in a Ukrainian steelmaker from the billionaire Russian-Canadian developer Alexander Shnaider, who was constructing the hotel at the time.

To be clear, VEB is not actually a bank at all. It’s not under the purview of Russia’s central bank, and — on its own website — says it does not compete with commercial credit institutions and participates only in those projects that cannot receive funding from private investors. Instead, VEB says its mission is “to enhance the competitiveness of the Russian economy, diversify it and stimulate investment activity.”

And Sergey Gorkov — the man Jared Kushner met in December — was handpicked to run it in 2016 by Putin himself. Gorkov is a graduate of Russia’s secret service academy, which produced a number of oligarchs who made fortunes during the chaos of post-Soviet Russia, including Putin himself. It is funded directly by Russia’s federal budget, which has sometimes meant operating in suboptimal financial conditions but also ties the bank directly to the country’s leadership. More here from BusinessInsider.

Two Senators signed a letter of inquiry regarding Sergey Gorkov and Jared Kushner illustrating concern of meeting omissions on the Kushner S-86 form and is asking the FBI for further details.

Lawsuit Advances on Trump Dossier Case, McCain Testimony

Posted on July 11, 2017July 11, 2017 by Denise Simon

Okay, this cat Aleksej Gubarev who owns a few internet tech companies has launched the lawsuit(s). Seems too that Gubarev is a Russian venture capitalist based out of Cyprus has an operational location in Dallas. His company boasts 75,000 servers across the globe. McCain was sent the 35 Trump dossier and had official conversations about the dossier with officials and passed the dossier to the FBI.

***

Former British ambassador to Moscow admits warning John McCain about Trump dossier

WASHINGTON

Sen. John McCain faces questions in a defamation lawsuit about leaks leading to publication of the now-infamous dossier that alleged Donald Trump’s campaign had connections to Russian operatives, McClatchy has learned.

The dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele and his London firm, Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd., amounted to a collection of uncorroborated reports of collusion gathered as political research for sale to Trump’s opponents. It proved explosive when published by online news site BuzzFeed on Jan. 10.

Now, two lawsuits — one in the United States and a second in the U.K. — are being brought by lawyers for Aleksej Gubarev, a Cyprus-based Internet entrepreneur whom Steele’s Russian sources accused of cyber spying against the Democratic Party leadership.

According to a new court document in the British lawsuit, counsel for defendants Steele and Orbis repeatedly point to McCain, R-Ariz., a vocal Trump critic, and a former State Department official as two in a handful of people known to have had copies of the full document before it circulated among journalists and was published by BuzzFeed.

The court document obtained by McClatchy confirms that Sir Andrew Wood, a former British ambassador to Moscow and a Russia adviser to former Prime Minister Tony Blair, discussed the 35-page dossier with McCain.

“The Defendants considered that the issues were self-evidently relevant to the national security of the US, UK and their allies,” the document says, explaining why Steele and his partner, Christopher Burrows, felt it necessary to share the dossier’s findings.

*** The lawsuit document is here.

Wood had told Britain’s The Guardian in January that McCain had reached out to him about the dossier, and had obtained it through other means. The court document confirms that Wood, Steele and former State Department official David Kramer decided together that new information gathered after the election should be shared with authorities in Britain and the United States.

A McCain spokesperson declined to comment Monday on the new court document, pointing instead to a Jan. 11 statement from the veteran senator about the dossier. “Upon examination of the contents, and unable to make a judgment about their accuracy, I delivered the information to the director of the FBI,” McCain had said then. “That has been the extent of my contact with the FBI or any other government agency regarding this issue.”

In recent congressional testimony, ex-FBI Director James Comey, fired by Trump amid a widening probe, acknowledged receiving the dossier from McCain on Jan. 6. Kramer, a former State Department official who until recently served as a senior director at Arizona State University’s McCain Institute for International Leadership, declined comment.

The British court documents are legal responses in the British suit and do not reflect the entire docket. The British suit is related to a similar lawsuit in the United States against online news site BuzzFeed.

At least a dozen national media organizations had a copy of the Steele dossier before it became public but hadn’t published details because much of the information had not been corroborated.

McClatchy was among them and subsequently published numerous reports on people named in the dossier, including a Russian diplomat and a supposed hacker who apparently is an imprisoned pedophile.

The dossier, without substantiation, said Gubarev’s U.S.-based global web-hosting companies, XBT and Webzilla, planted digital bugs, transmitted viruses and conducted altering operations against the Democratic Party leadership.

While one key name in the dossier was blackened out by BuzzFeed, Gubarev’s was not. He alleges that he was never contacted for comment, suffering reputational harm in the process.

In the court document, Steele’s barrister, Nicola Cain, argued that the portion of the dossier dealing with Gubarev, which came in weeks after Trump’s election and after Steele was no longer paid by his client for research, amounted to raw intelligence and was advertised as such. She did not return a call or email requests for comment.

Capturing Terrorists Again and Going to Gitmo?

Posted on July 10, 2017July 10, 2017 by Denise Simon

Notice that for years, no terrorist has been captured on the battlefield, they have simply been killed per the edict of the Obama administration. It has made intelligence collection and cultivation almost impossible and in some cases under the previous administration has led to the deaths of innocent civilians due to collateral damage or bad ground control.

The most recent capture was in 2014 of Abu Khattalah of Benghazi, the only terrorist detained and he is presently being held in the Washington DC area.

Meanwhile: The case of United States v. Ibrahim Ahmed Mahmoud al Qosi proceedings at Fort Belvoir, Va., scheduled for July 12. He was released by Obama from Gitmo to his home country Sudan and made his way to Yemen working for AQAP.

The charge sheet for Ahmed Abu Khattalah is here.

The Trump administration appears to be making its first moves toward fulfilling a campaign promise to fill the Guantanamo Bay prison camp with “bad dudes.”

Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein visited the prison on Friday to get an update on current operations, the first concrete action the administration has taken on the facility since taking office.

Up until now, Guantanamo has been running on autopilot; the executive order from former President Obama calling for the facility to be shut down is still technically the law of the land. More here from The Hill.

ABC

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba — In the highest-ranking known visit by a Trump administration official, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats, were visiting this remote outpost Friday to get “an up-to-date understanding” of current war-on-terror operations.

Rod Rosenstein, Sessions’ deputy, was also on the tour. Its first stop was the war court compound, Camp Justice, where the Pentagon holds pretrial hearings in the death penalty case against five alleged plotters of the Sept. 11 terror attacks, and others accused of terrorism and war crimes.

They also toured the Detention Center Zone where, after an extensive Obama administration downsizing effort, the Pentagon holds 41 war prisoners, 10 charged with crimes and five cleared for release through Obama or Bush administration review boards.

“Keeping this country safe from terrorists is the highest priority of the Trump administration,” Justice Department spokesman Ian D. Prior said in a statement issued before the VIP party landed at the base and took a special boat rather than the large ferry across Guantanamo Bay.

A court hearing was postponed until afternoon to accommodate the visit. It comes as the chief war court judge, Army Col. James L. Pohl, has been openly complaining about insufficient resources to mount a robust schedule of 2018 hearings in the 9/11 and USS Cole cases.

Other attorneys general have visited the site, including Michael Mukasey for the Bush administration in 2008 and Eric Holder for the Obama administration in 2009. This visit — coming more than five months into the Trump administration, even as the White House has yet to officially rescind Barack Obama’s 2009 closure order — may be seen as a signal of support for the detention operation and the war court where six men are in pretrial, death penalty proceedings for the Sept. 11 and USS Cole attacks.

The one-day visit was announced hours before a Saudi man was due at the war court for a pre-sentencing hearing. Ahmed al-Darbi pleaded guilty to war crimes in February 2014, in exchange for a commitment to let him serve out his sentence of up to 15 years in his homeland starting next year.

“Recent attacks in Europe and elsewhere confirm that the threat to our nation is immediate and real,” Prior said in his statement, “and it remains essential that we use every lawful tool available to prevent as many attacks as possible.”

He said the goal of the visit was for the officials to meet with “the people on the ground who are leading our government-wide efforts at GTMO,” using the Navy acronym from for the 45-square-mile base in southeast Cuba. “In addition to the Department of Justice’s role in handling detainee-related litigation,” he added, “it is important for the Department of Justice to have an up-to-date understanding of current operations.”

Coats’ spokesman, Timothy L. Barrett, issued an identical statement to the Department of Justice’s on the trip’s purpose: “To gain an understanding of current operations by meeting with the people on the ground who are leading our government-wide efforts at GTMO.”

Others on the tour included Adm. Kurt Tidd, the commander of the U.S. Southern Command, which has oversight of the prison; Navy Rear Adm. Edward Cashman, the detention center commander; and Col. Steve Gabavics, the head of the guard force, said Pentagon spokesman Air Force Maj. Ben Sakrisson.

He declined to say whether they visited the prison’s clandestine Camp 7, where former CIA captives are kept in military custody, in what he called a “standard tour of the camps.” The group had lunch in the Detention Center Zone at the Seaside Galley mess hall where guards and other prison staff eat.

Sessions first visited in late January 2002 as a U.S. senator and has long been one of the most enthusiastic supporters of the prison and military commissions system, whose rules are a hybrid of U.S. military and federal legal systems.

The visit comes as the U.S. Southern Command, not so long ago run by Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, is proposing an up to $100 million construction project to house 13,000 temporary migrants and 5,000 support staff on the base near the airstrip. The Navy, in announcing the proposal, called it a “contingency mass migration complex.”

The war court and Detention Center Zone staffed by 1,500 troops and civilians are on the opposite side of the base, requiring a ferry ride across Guantanamo Bay.

No such mass exodus is foreseen. First, the Obama administration canceled a decades-old “wet foot, dry foot” policy that let Cubans who reach U.S. shores gain legal entry. Now the Trump administration is pursuing deportations of undocumented immigrants, a program championed by Sessions.

“There are no detention facilities involved in this project,” Southcom spokesman Army Maj. Vance Trenkel said by email on Thursday. “This project is to assist with mass migration operations … caused by things such as a natural disaster.”

In the 1990s the base was used to shelter more than 50,000 Cubans and Haitians who were stopped at sea from reaching the United States.

The Dark-World with U-47700 and Bitcoin

Posted on July 8, 2017July 8, 2017 by Denise Simon

Congress should sanction China operations due to synthetic opioid production and should also list all variants of synthetic opioids as weapons of mass destruction under the chemical and biological weapons convention. DEA now has offices in China to work with officials there and investigation trafficking patterns.

Insight

The United States consumes 85% of all the world’s natural and synthetic opiates, which in 2015 factored in 33,091 U.S. deaths, up more than 4000 from the previous year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Opioid overdoses have quadrupled since 1999. When average U.S. life expectancies for men and women edged downward last year, for the first time in decades, many health professionals blamed opiate abuse.

The opium poppy is no longer the starting point for many of the opiates on the street. The new compounds, often sold mixed with heroin, originate in illicit labs in China. “For the cartels, why wait for a field of poppies to grow and harvest if you can get your hands on the precursor chemicals and cook a batch of fentanyl in a lab?” says Tim Reagan, resident agent in charge of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA’s) Cincinnati office.

In late 2015, the drug agency persuaded its Chinese counterpart to add 116 synthetic drugs to its list of controlled substances; fentanyl and several analogs were included. In response, underground Chinese labs began tweaking the fentanyl molecule, which is easy to alter for anyone with basic knowledge of chemistry and lab tools. By adding chemical groups, unscrupulous chemists have created new, unregulated variants, some of them even more potent than the original.

Hoping to stem the tide of synthetic opiates, DEA has taken the fight to China, as prolific a maker of illicit drugs as it is of legitimate chemicals. According to a U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission report last month, “China is a global source of illicit fentanyl and other [new psychoactive substances] because the country’s vast chemical and pharmaceutical industries are weakly regulated and poorly monitored.” In response to U.S. pressure, China has scheduled fentanyl and several other derivatives. More here.

U-47700

COMMON NAMES

U-47700

EFFECTS CLASSIFICATIONS

Opioid

CHEMICAL NAME

3,4-dichloro-N-[2-(dimethylamino)cyclohexyl]-N-methylbenzamide

DESCRIPTION

U-47700 is a short-acting synthetic opioid analgesic that first became available via online vendors in late 2014. It has only a short history of human use. U-47700 has been detected in counterfeit pharmaceutical opioids and associated with deaths.

Mar-Apr 2016 – Fake oxycodone tablets containing U-47700 are seized by law enforcement in Ohio and fake Norco tablets containing U-47700 and fentanyl appear in the Sacramento, CA area.

An 18-Year-Old Girl Died From a Synthetic Opioid She Bought Online. Here’s How Portland Police Cracked the Case.

A fatal overdose in East Portland leads detectives into the Dark Web, where lab-created opioids are bought with Bitcoin.

Courtesy of Jessica Collins

Even by Portland standards, the weather was dreary on the day Aisha Zughbieh-Collins died.

It was late morning Feb. 16 when Jessica Collins drove through a 40-degree drizzle to the pink and yellow townhouse on Southeast 84th Avenue, where Aisha, her 18-year-old daughter, lived.

Collins drove gingerly down the rutted, dead-end gravel street. It’s the kind of street that’s often lined with abandoned shopping carts.

She got out of her truck, walked into Aisha’s townhouse and climbed the stairs with a sense of dread. For the past 12 hours, Collins had been unable to reach her daughter.

Just two weeks earlier, Aisha had overdosed, her life saved when a roommate called paramedics.

As Collins entered her daughter’s bedroom, Aisha was sitting lotus-style on her bed.

“Each step closer I could tell something was really wrong,” Collins recalls.

Aisha had a syringe in her right arm, and a shoelace tourniquet tied around her biceps. She wasn’t breathing. Her skin was cold.

“I know it sounds strange,” Collins says, “but a sense of peace came over me—that she’s OK now—even though she was dead in front of me.”

Drug overdoses now kill more people than firearms or automobile crashes in Oregon, according to state figures, and are the largest cause of accidental death in the U.S. As the country’s overdose death total continues to soar, Oregon officials have responded far more effectively than officials in most states (see chart below).

While opioid overdose deaths nationally rose 57 percent from 2010 to 2015, they actually dropped slightly in Oregon over the same period. Source: Oregon Health Authority