Las Vegas home health exec indicted on wage fixing charges
A home health agency executive has been indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of conspiring to fix wages earned by Las Vegas nurses in violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, officials said Thursday.
The indictment alleges that Eduardo Lopez, while an executive for three home health firms in Las Vegas, agreed with other unnamed co-conspirators to eliminate competition for nursing services by setting employee wages at fixed amounts from March 2016 to May 2019, the U.S. Attorney’s Office stated.
Lopez, who managed recruitment, hiring, retention and assignments of nurses and other health care staff, conducted meetings with the co-conspirators where they discussed how to keep wages earned by nurses at specific levels so they could not be increased, the federal prosecutor’s office stated.
“Wage fixing is a crime that deprives workers of hard-earned wages,” said Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division.
The indictment resulted from a federal investigation by the Antitrust Division’s San Francisco Office and the International Corruption Unit of the FBI with the assistance of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Nevada, federal officials said
Violating the Sherman Act carries a sentence of up to 10 years in prison and a $1 million fine for individuals and a fine of up to $100 million for corporations, the officials said.
Contact Jeff Burbank at jburbank@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0382. Follow him @JeffBurbank2 on Twitter.
