BOSTON — Members of the US Senate committee looking into Steward Health Care’s bankruptcy approved two resolutions on Thursday designed to hold CEO Ralph de la Torre in contempt – one for public performance and the other for criminal contempt – for not testifying before the panel.
The votes come after de la Torre refused to attend a committee hearing last week despite being served with a subpoena. Both resolutions will be sent to the full Senate for consideration.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent and chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said de la Torre’s decision to defy the subpoena gave the committee little choice but to seek contempt charges.
“For months, this committee has invited Dr. de la Torre to testify about the misappropriation of funds and what happened at Steward Health Care,” Sanders said at Thursday’s hearing. Time after time he has proudly refused to appear.
In a letter sent to the committee on Wednesday, Alexander Merton, de la Torre’s lawyer, said the committee’s request for him to testify would violate his Fifth Amendment rights.
The constitution protects de la Torre from being forced by the government to provide sworn testimony designed to make him “scapegoat for the failings of Massachusetts’ health care system,” Merton wrote, adding that de la Torre will agree to testify. the next day.
“Our concern that the Court will be used to ambush Dr. de la Torre in a bogus criminal case was fully expressed last week, when the Committee called for evidence from witnesses who called Dr. de la Torre and Steward’s management. ‘healthcare terrorists’ and advocating the imprisonment of Dr. de la Torre,” Merton added.
The decision to implement the civil process of the subpoena instructs the legal counsel of the Senate to bring the case to the District Court for the District of Columbia to demand the testimony of de la Torre before the committee.
The criminal contempt decision will refer the matter to the US attorney for the District of Columbia to prosecute de la Torre criminally for failing to comply with the subpoena.
“Although Dr. de la Torre is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Although he can afford luxury yachts and private jets and luxury residences around the world. Although he can afford the most expensive lawyers in America, Dr. de la Torre is not above the law,” Sanders said.
Texas-based Steward, which operates about 30 hospitals nationwide, filed for bankruptcy in May,
Steward has been working to sell twenty-two hospitals in Massachusetts but received insufficient bids for two other hospitals, Carney Hospital in Boston and Nashoba Valley Medical Center in the town of Ayer, both of which closed for that reason.
A federal bankruptcy court this month approved the sale of Steward’s other Massachusetts hospitals.
Steward also closed nurseries in Massachusetts and Louisiana, closed baby centers in Florida and Texas, and terminated maternity services at a Florida hospital.
At the same time, de la Torre made hundreds of millions of dollars himself and bought a $40 million yacht and a $15 million luxury fishing boat, Sanders said.
Ellen MacInnis, a nurse at St. Elizabeth’s Boston, testified before the committee last week that under Steward’s administration, patients were at risk of preventable and even death, especially in understaffed emergency departments.
He also said that there was a time when Steward failed to pay a vendor who provided caskets for the remains of newborn babies who died and had to be taken to a morgue.
“The nurses were forced to put the remains of the babies in cardboard shipping boxes,” he said. “These nurses collected their money and went to Amazon and bought the dead boxes. .”
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