Desai posts $1 million bail in hepatitis C case, lawyer says

His lawyer, Richard Wright, said a cashier’s check for $1 million was posted with the clerk’s office in District Court about 4 p.m.

Desai is scheduled at 9 a.m. Wednesday to be arraigned on a sweeping criminal indictment, but Wright said he might seek another date. The case has been assigned to District Judge Donald Mosley.

Desai, who ran the clinics where health officials said unsafe injection practices led to hepatitis C infections, and two of his former nurse anesthetists, Ronald Lakeman and Keith Mathahs, face 28 felony counts, including racketeering, neglect of patients, insurance fraud and performance of an act of reckless disregard of persons or property.

Late Monday, neither Lakeman nor Mathahs had been arrested on bench warrants issued last week.

Las Vegas police said a fugitive detail in Atlanta, where Lakeman lives, was looking for him there. Mathahs’ lawyer, Jack Buchanan, filed court papers Monday morning asking that Mathahs be allowed to surrender to authorities at the Clark County Detention Center and be released on his own recognizance. Buchanan said his client is 74 and has no criminal history.

District Judge Elissa Cadish had set bail at $500,000 each for Mathahs and Lakeman.

When the indictment was unsealed Friday, prosecutors sought a $10 million bond for Desai, alleging he was a flight risk and worth at least $30 million. He reportedly once bragged about being able to gain access to as much as $180 million, prosecutors said.

But Wright persuaded Cadish to order the lesser bail after arguing that Desai is in poor health because of several strokes and that all of his money is tied up in U.S. Bankruptcy Court.

Desai’s attorneys sought Bankruptcy Court permission Friday to dip into his assets to post the $1 million bond.

In court papers, Desai’s wife, Kusum Desai, said she was trying to get cash from relatives to help with the bail, but she wasn’t sure they would be able to help. By Monday afternoon, however, Desai’s lawyers had advised the court that a relative had stepped forward.

The charges in the indictment against Desai revolve around the cases of seven people health officials say were infected with the potentially deadly hepatitis C virus at Desai’s Endoscopy Center of Southern Nevada, one on July 25, 2007, and six on Sept. 21, 2007.

The racketeering count, which draws a maximum 20-year prison term, alleges Desai and the other defendants carried out a criminal enterprise between June 2005 and May 2008 that falsified anesthesia records during routine procedures at his clinics and submitted false anesthesia records to insurance companies to obtain money under false pretenses.

The insurance companies were billed in excess of the actual cost for the anesthetic and time devoted to the endoscopic procedure.

The indictment also alleges Desai pressured clinic employees into using additional doses of the sedative propofol from single-use vials on more than one patient during procedures, contrary to accepted safety standards. The employees also were alleged to have been pressured into reusing syringes and needles and other medical instruments .

The indictment accuses Desai of creating an environment at his clinics that limited the use of medical supplies necessary to conduct safe endoscopic procedures and rushed those procedures on a daily basis at the expense of patient safety — all for the purpose of "enhancing" financial profits.