CLINIC OPERATOR CHARGED WITH HEALTH CARE FRAUD.

Byline: TONY CASTRO Staff Writer

A Russian immigrant living in Agoura Hills has been charged with bilking Medicare out of more than $1.4 million in an elaborate scam in which he used Mother Teresa's personal physician to prey on homeless patients from Skid Row.

Rudik Avakyan, 55, in jail on $1.1 million bail, faces arraignment Monday on charges that he recruited Medi-Cal and Medicare card holders at Los Angeles's Union Rescue Mission for fraudulent billing at a clinic he owned and operated.

According to authorities, the clinic's medical director -- Dr. Prasantha Nath, who once counted the late Mother Teresa among his patients -- was an unwitting participant in the scam that included the fraudulent reporting of medical services that were never provided and billing for services provided to patients who were dead.

Nath is not a defendant in the case, authorities said, and, in fact, was a victim of identity theft in the scam.

Nath worked at Avakyan's clinic two or three days a week -- and only for a few weeks before quitting -- treating a handful of patients each day, a state Attorney General's investigation found.

But authorities say that Avakyan's clinic fraudulently submitted claims for hundreds of patients that Nath ``could not possibly have treated, padded Medicare bills with treatments that never occurred, submitted bills for services rendered to 35 patients who were already deceased, and filled out medical treatment charts for patients as much as six months prior to them actually being seen by a doctor.''

Avakyan and two co-defendants also went so far as to bill Medicare for treatments that Nath purportedly provided patients while he was out of the country helping tsunami victims in Sri Lanka and the needy in India, according to investigators.

Nath's physician provider number was used for Medicare billings several month past the time he had left the clinic, authorities said.

Avakyan was arrested last week at his home by agents from the Attorney General's Bureau of Medi-Cal Fraud and Elder Abuse.

His co-defendants, Gayane Abramyan, 44, and Lusine Khatchatryan, were described by authorities as ``purported medical assistants at the Workplace Industrial Management Clinic in Los Angeles.''

The three are charged with a felony complaint alleging 37 counts of grand theft, attempted grand theft and filing of false claims.

Bail was set at $100,000 each for both Abramyan and Khatchatryan.

Prosecutors also succeeded in attaching a motion to Avakyan's bail that would require him to prove that the money he uses to post bail did not come from the proceeds of the alleged crime.

Attorneys for the defendants could not be reached for comment.

According to authorities, the scam began unraveling in the summer of 2005 when officials from the Union Rescue Mission reported the suspicious recruitment of the homeless by so-called ``cappers'' who would regularly round up Skid Row residents into vans with promises of free meals and a $50 cash payment.

Avakyan and his defendants would then pay the cappers $350 for each patient they brought to his clinic, authorities said.

Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez, D-Los Angeles, whose office received report of the suspicious recruitment of the homeless in Skid Row, called for ``the harshest penalties allowed by law.''

``We cannot tolerate this kind of fraud,'' Nunez said in a statement, ``I am pleased by the hard work done by the Attorney General's Office to unravel this ring of rip-off artists.''

In announcing the arrests, Attorney General Bill Lockyer said ``these defendants must be held accountable for allowing their greed to turn to fraud.''

``Medicare and Medi-Cal fraud not only rips off taxpayers,'' he said, ``it also puts public health at risk by limiting the amount of resources available to help those truly in need.''

tony.castro(at)dailynews.com

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