The U.S. Attorney for Minnesota, Andy Luger, issued a press release yesterday announcing a 13-count indictment against three executives of Evergreen Recovery for Medicaid fraud. Two of the three employees were arraigned yesterday in Federal court in downtown Minneapolis.
A.J. Lagoe of KARE-11 has been on this story from the beginning. Evergreen was formerly in the business of providing addiction treatment services from a location on Energy Park Drive in St. Paul.
Lagoe reports that the estimate for the total amount of the fraud exceeds $30 million. This KARE-11 story includes a copy of the 14-page Federal indictment at the bottom.
We first reported on the story back in August. Initially, the Feds filed a civil case against Evergreen Recovery, in an action akin to an involuntary bankruptcy, to shut down the business. There have been no new developments in the civil case since October.
The civil case names five Evergreen corporate entities and three individuals as defendants. The criminal case names three individuals as defendants, with only two names overlapping from the civil case.
Shawn Grygo, an Evergreen co-owner, and Shantel Magadanz, Evergreen CEO, appear in both civil and criminal cases. Heather Heim, Evergreen CFO, is the third criminal defendant.
Conspicuous by his absence in the criminal indictment is Grygo’s husband and Evergreen co-owner, David Backus.
Grygo has yet to make an initial court appearance in the criminal case. The Luger press release indicates that Grygo will make an initial appearance on Monday, December 23. However, as of the close of business on Friday, no such item appeared on the official court schedule.
Both she and Backus appeared in court for the civil case last August.
Based on the upward revision in the size of the Evergreen fraud, we have revised our total figure in the official ScandalTracker 2424 spreadsheet, which now stand at over $545 million,