Doctor pleads guilty to faking death and fleeing to Egypt to avoid federal prosecution in 2002
A doctor from Newport Beach once accused of Medi-Cal fraud pleaded guilty Tuesday to fleeing federal prosecution by faking his own death and living abroad in Egypt for the last 14 years.
Tigran Svadjian, 58, admitted that he hid in Russia then Egypt after leaving California in 2002 to avoid facing charges that he allegedly bilked California out of millions through fraudulent billings.
Before he vanished, Svadjian had agreed to go undercover to help investigators catch co-conspirators.
If he had been convicted in the case, he would have faced up to 10 years in prison. But in the years since Svadjian fled, federal investigators said the evidence they had against him was discarded, eliminating the chance to prosecute him on the much more serious charges that he originally faced.
For pleading guilty to fleeing prosecution on Tuesday, Svadjian now faces a maximum of five years in prison. He’s scheduled to be sentenced Feb. 9.
According to a letter that the state Department of Health and Human Services sent to Svadjian before he fled in 2002, a 14-month audit of his practices in Fresno and Los Angeles revealed he had overbilled California more than $1.9 million in treatments for state-insured patients.
The letter contended Svadjian provided only 13 of 200 medical records the state requested as part of an audit and that he could not account for 94% of the services he had allegedly performed. Some of the patients he had supposedly treated were dead, authorities said.
Prosecutors eventually made Svadjian an offer, according to an FBI affidavit filed this summer: If he wore a wire and turned against his co-conspirators, his case would be kept confidential and the charges possibly reduced.
Svadjian agreed but then hopped on a flight to Russia. His lawyer told prosecutors that he’d be back by the end of October.
But on the last day of that month, Svadjian’s attorney in L.A. sent a fax to federal prosecutors in Sacramento. Included was a Report of the Death of an American Citizen Abroad from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. Svadjian had died 11 days prior on Barklaya Street, the document said, and his remains were cremated and given to his mother.
After Svadjian absconded in 2002, he took on two different identities and started a new life in Egypt, where he found a girlfriend and had two sons. His second child was born this summer, said Andre Townsend, Svadjian’s public defender.
“He’s just eager to get back to Egypt,” Townsend said after his client’s guilty plea Tuesday.
But in fleeing 14 years ago, Svadjian had also abandoned the family he had established with his first wife in the U.S. Svadjian had gotten married in New York in the 1980s, followed by a son and daughter in the following years.
In a brief interview with The Times after Svadjian’s arrest this summer, his estranged wife, Emilya, said she was “devastated” to learn he was alive and that she had collected his ashes and received his death certificate after his supposed demise.
Svadjian had paid a Russian police officer $200 to fake his death and in return, was given a fake death certificate from a morgue in Moscow.
He was arrested this summer in Ukraine with a fake passport when he tried to enter Russia to be with his girlfriend for the birth of their son, according to an FBI affidavit.
For breaking California news, follow @JosephSerna on Twitter.
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