CEO of company that sought to reopen Patrick County hospital indicted on embezzlement charges in Chicago

The president and CEO of Foresight Health, the company that more than two years ago pledged to reopen the long-shuttered hospital in Patrick County, has been indicted on federal charges of scheming to embezzle more than $15 million from a hospital in Chicago between 2018 and 2022.

Sameer Suhail, 47, is charged with six counts of wire fraud, six counts of aiding and abetting embezzlement, and two counts of money laundering, court records show.

Suhail did not respond to an email seeking comment Sunday, but he told Cardinal News in May 2022 that at the time no legal action had resulted from the federal investigations, and that “if any illegal activity did occur,” it happened without his knowledge. “If rogue actors did act in any way untoward, I would of course condemn it.”

According to the indictment that was unsealed Thursday, Suhail and his two co-defendants — former Loretto Hospital executive Anosh Ahmed, 40, and former chief transformation officer Heather Bergdahl, 37 — “knowingly devised … and participated in a scheme to defraud, and to obtain money and funds” from the hospital “by means of materially false and fraudulent pretenses, representations and promises.”

The indictment alleges that in order to conceal their scheme, the defendants created “fictitious documents, including fictitious invoices, payment requests, delivery receipts and other documents, which contained false information about goods and services” provided by entities associated with the trio.

The court records say that Suhail’s responsibilities at Loretto Hospital “included issuing checks to hospital vendors based on vendor payment requests submitted through the hospital’s computerized vendor payment system and as directed by Bergdahl.”

Suhail founded Foresight Health in February 2022 after he heard about the vacant Patrick County hospital property. Mississippi-based Pioneer Health Services had closed the 25-bed facility in Stuart in 2017, more than a year after filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Foresight purchased the 10-acre property on April 7, 2022, from Virginia Community Capital, the hospital’s creditor, for $2.1 million. But initial plans to open a critical access facility by the end of that year were delayed several times, until they collapsed altogether.

In March, Foresight sold the property to Chicago-based Wolf of Wabash LLC for $1.6 million, entering an agreement with the new owner to lease back the property and use the proceeds of the sale to modernize the building and open a behavioral health and substance abuse program.

By that time, relations between Patrick County officials and Foresight leadership has deteriorated after the company had offered to donate the property to the county — if the county would pay half of the expenses Foresight said it had incurred while working on the project.

But not all of the $1.63 million in expenses listed in a spreadsheet compiled by the company and obtained by Cardinal News pertained directly to the hospital, including $22,000 in payments made to the county’s economic development director at the time and more than $457,000 for private jet travel and lodging at a luxury resort.

And the ongoing criminal investigations into Suhail’s work back in Chicago continued to hover over Foresight’s increasingly rocky relationship with Patrick County.

In 2021, Sameer Suhail owned at least four companies with ties to Chicago’s Loretto Hospital, which had been at the center of several controversies — including a vaccination scandal — and an investigation by the Illinois Attorney General’s Office and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

It’s unclear what, if anything, the indictment could mean for the Patrick County project. Patrick County Administrator Beth Simms did not respond to an email seeking comment on Sunday.

But Del. Wren Williams, R-Patrick County, who helped spark Foresight’s interest in the project more than two years ago, called the news of Suhail’s indictment “troubling.”

“It seems Foresight acted in bad faith and our community has again suffered a major setback,” Williams said in a text message Sunday.

“We’re committed to working with local and federal leaders to bring quality and affordable healthcare resources to Patrick County.”

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