Prosecutors charged Proove Biosciences for alleged fraud and doctor kickback scheme but dismissed case amid allegations of violating attorney-client privilege
Federal prosecutors from San Diego have dismissed a Medicare fraud case against an Irvine biosciences company and its top leaders amid accusations from defense attorneys of prosecutorial missteps.
Assistant U.S. attorneys from San Diego, who admitted in court filings that at least one trial prosecutor had viewed potentially privileged documents handed over by the taint team, did not give a specific reason for dismissing the case. They wrote in a motion that they were doing so “due to the interests of justice.”
The FBI and federal prosecutors began investigating Proove Biosciences as early as 2017, according to court documents. In late 2016, the health and medicine news website STAT News had, and in 2021 a federal grand jury in the Central District of California returned an indictment alleging that Meshkin and eight others who worked for or with Proove had defrauded Medicare by running an illegal kickback scheme., a former Proove employee said the company paid physicians across the country at least $3.
De Bretteville called it a “mystery.” Janet Levine, an attorney for one of the defendants, filed a motion last month calling the out-of-district prosecution “unusual” and questioning why the San Diego-area attorneys had presented the case to a grand jury in Santa Ana and were trying the case in that jurisdiction.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Josh Green, the lead prosecutor, had previously told Levine in two emails that Grossman had been walled off from the Proove investigation and had “not personally participated in this matter in any manner.” He said the Department of Justice formally recused Grossman in September 2022 and that Grossman’s name appeared on court filings “due to an oversight.”
The issue that appeared to loom largest at the end of the case revolved around the work of the taint team and questions about who had seen some 85 allegedly privileged documents.
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