Executive Gets 30 Years in $2.9 Billion Fraud - One acquittal, the ex-CFO of Columbia Homecare Group

Executive Gets 30 Years in $2.9 Billion Fraud
By ZACHERY KOUWE
Published: March 27, 2009
NYT

Nearly seven years after National Century Financial Enterprises collapsed in a $2.9 billion fraud, its founder, Lance K. Poulsen, was sentenced to 30 years in prison on Friday in one of the harshest white-collar punishments in history.

Mr. Poulsen was convicted in October of leading a vast fraud as chief executive of National Century, a company based in Dublin, Ohio, that provided financing for hundreds of clinics, hospitals and other health care providers.

The company’s fall in 2002 contributed to the bankruptcies of 275 health care facilities and cost Credit Suisse and the Pacific Investment Management Company, the nation’s biggest bond fund investor, more than $540 million.

“Mr. Poulsen is an architect of a fraud of such magnitude that it would make sophisticated financial analysts shudder,” Judge Algenon Marbley said in Federal District Court in Ohio. “It is considered the largest fraud at a private company in the United States. Mr. Poulsen perpetrated this fraud over a seven-year period and went to enormous lengths to conceal it.”

Mr. Poulsen, 65, is already serving a 10-year sentence for trying to bribe the main witness against him in the case. His sentence will run concurrently with the sentence for witness tampering.

Mr. Marbley’s decision signals that federal judges could begin imposing harsher sentences for white-collar crime in response to the rise in public outrage over corporate fraud after the discovery of Bernard L. Madoff’s multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme. The sentence for Mr. Poulsen exceeds the 25 years given to Bernard J. Ebbers, the former chief executive of WorldCom, and the 24 years given to Jeffrey K. Skilling, the former Enron chief.

Mr. Marbley also handed out a 25-year sentence to Rebecca Parrett, a former National Century executive who became a fugitive after she was convicted last year.

Mr. Poulsen and Ms. Parrett were also ordered to pay $2.38 billion in restitution.

Before it filed for bankruptcy in 2002, National Century provided loans to a variety of health care companies that were backed by payments expected to be made by insurance companies and government programs like Medicaid and Medicare. Mr. Poulsen then packaged the loans into bonds and sold them to institutional investors and Wall Street firms.

In many cases, the company deliberately lent more to the facilities, many of which were owned by Mr. Poulsen, than their receivables were worth. The scheme finally came apart in the spring of 2002 when investors began to question the value of the loans, which forced National Century into a liquidity crisis.