The City of Chicago has reached a $10 million settlement with Uber Technologies Inc. stemming from allegations that Uber Eats and Postmates listed restaurants on their platforms without consent, and that restaurants were charged more than legally allowed.

Uber, which owns Postmates, and Chicago reached the deal after a two-year investigation by the city, the mayor’s office announced Monday. Chicago put in place an emergency 15% delivery-fee cap related to the COVID-19 pandemic, and is suing other delivery-app companies for not living up to that law and other local rules meant to protect restaurants and consumers.

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Chicago sued Uber competitors DoorDash Inc. and Grubhub last year, alleging deceptive fees and predatory practices that include behavior similar to some of the allegations against Uber. For example, the lawsuits allege that the companies cause problems for nonpartner restaurants when they scrape information about them online and don’t verify their accuracy. The lawsuit against DoorDash is in the discovery process, while there will be a hearing in the suit against Grubhub next week, according to Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll, the law firm working with the city on the case.

Read Uber Agrees to Pay $10 Million for Listing Chicago Restaurants Without Their Consent.

In a new lawsuit, Northwest Biotherapeutics accuses market makers of illicit ‘spoofing’ trades

A biotechnology company accused Citadel Securities LLC, Susquehanna International Group LLP and other Wall Street firms of driving down its stock price through a series of illicit trades.

In a lawsuit filed Thursday in Manhattan federal court, Northwest Biotherapeutics Inc. alleged the market makers had repeatedly engaged in “spoofing,” where traders place orders with an intent to fool other investors about a stock’s demand and manipulate the price.

Northwest, whose shares trade over the counter, also sued Canaccord Genuity Inc. G1 Execution Services LLC, GTS Securities LLC, Instinet LLC, Lime Trading Corp. and Virtu Americas LLC.

Spokesmen for Citadel and Virtu didn’t immediately comment. The other firms didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Spoofing, which was outlawed in 2010, has been at the center of a yearslong campaign by U.S. authorities to root out market manipulation. In August, a federal jury in Chicago convicted two former JPMorgan Chase & Co. traders who had been charged with spoofing in the gold market.

In the modern stock market, high-speed trading firms like Citadel and Susquehanna provide stock quotes throughout the day, executing orders from other investors while collecting a thin spread between the buying and selling price of the shares.

It’s unclear from the data cited in the suit whether the alleged spoofing trades were placed on behalf of other investors, or by the firms themselves.

But Northwest argued that these market makers knew it was unlawful to execute the alleged trades and should have had procedures in place to detect and prevent them.

The market makers, Northwest wrote, “deliberately engaged in repeated spoofing that interfered with the natural forces of supply and demand and drove (the company’s) share price downward over the course of the relevant period.”

Northwest said the alleged spoofing trades, which occurred between December 2017 and August 2022, battered the stock price even as the company released positive results from the trial of its lead product, a brain cancer treatment. In its suit, the company wrote that it had sold more than 49 million shares to raise money “at artificially depressed prices.”

“One of the tell-tale signs of a manipulative spoofer is a rapid reversal of trading direction — a lot of sell orders, followed by buy orders, followed by the cancellation of sell orders — which suggest the original sell orders were not intended to be executed, but were merely a ploy to drive the price down to `buy low,’” Northwest said in its complaint.

The company said it found thousands of spoofing episodes involving tens of millions of “baiting orders” over a five-year span, and was able to identify the market participants using trading data.

Northwest Biotherapeutics claims Citadel Securities, Virtu and others drove down its share price

A cancer-focused biotechnology company has sued eight of the US’s largest market making traders including Citadel Securities, Susquehanna and Virtu, alleging that they deliberately drove down its share price by placing sell orders they had no intention of executing.

The complaint, filed by Northwest Biotherapeutics in a federal court in New York on Thursday, claimed that the traders “deliberately engaged in repeated spoofing that interfered with the natural forces of supply and demand” by placing tens of millions of fake orders between December 2017 and August of this year.

The trading companies would then cancel those orders and buy Northwest’s shares at an artificially lower price, the complaint alleged.

Lawyers for the clinical-stage biotechnology firm claimed a “particularly egregious example” of this activity took place in May, after the publication of positive trial data for Northwest’s DCVax-L brain cancer drug.

The news “should have caused NWBO’s share price to increase, absent manipulation in the market”, they wrote, referring to the company’s stock symbol. Instead it dropped from $1.73 to a low of $0.3862.

“This staggering decline of 78 per cent in the price on a day with extremely positive news about the company was caused by defendants’ relentless and brazen manipulation of the market for NWBO shares,” lawyers at Cohen Milstein Sellers &Toll added.

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“It’s already underhanded to engage in market manipulation, but to do so at the expense of cancer patients, some of whom have no other treatments to place their hopes on, is unconscionable,” said Laura Posner, a partner at Cohen Milstein.

The church disputes that, and now a federal judge will decide if allegations of abuse will be heard by a panel of loyal Scientologists, not the courts.

Before Gawain and Laura Baxter could leave their posts as workers aboard the Church of Scientology’s religious ship in the Caribbean in 2012, the couple said they had no choice but to sign contracts they didn’t understand.

It was required before a security guard would hand over their passports, immigration records and identification, according to court records.

What they didn’t know, according to their declarations, is that they signed clauses agreeing to bring any future dispute before the church’s internal arbitration panel of loyal Scientologists, not the U.S. court system.

The Baxters and fellow Scientology worker Valeska Paris sued the church in April for trafficking, and now a Tampa federal judge is considering whether to grant the church’s request to punt the lawsuit into internal arbitration.

At a hearing on the motion Thursday, U.S. District Judge Thomas Barber asked both sides to explain whether the former Scientologists signed the contracts under duress. All three were members of the church’s military-style workforce called the Sea Org.

Cohen Milstein is honored to represent the plaintiffs in this case.

The largest U.S. producers of beef and pork illegally conspired to depress the wages of hundreds of thousands of meat plant workers since 2014, workers alleged in a proposed class action in Colorado federal court.

In their complaint filed Friday, a trio of beef and pork processing plant workers said a group of red meat producers including JBS USA, Cargill, Tyson Foods, Perdue Farms and others shared compensation data and collaborated with supposed competitors to ensure uniform, industrywide pay policies.

“Defendant processors engaged in the conspiracy to increase their profits by reducing labor costs,” the workers said. “The intended and actual effect of defendants’ conspiracy to fix compensation has been to reduce and suppress the wages, salaries and benefits paid to class members … to levels materially lower than they would have been in a competitive market.”

The workers said the companies, which collectively produce 80% of the red meat sold in the U.S. and employ roughly 150,000 workers, designed a compensation survey that gathered each company’s hourly wage rates, salaries and employment benefits data. That ostensibly nonpublic and confidential data, which was collected on behalf of the companies by consulting firm Webber Meng Sahl & Co., included nonpublic projections about future compensation policies, the plaintiffs claimed.

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The workers are represented by Robert Carey, Shana Scarlett, Rio Pierce, Steve Berman, Breanna Van Engelen and Abigail Pershing of Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro LLP, William Anderson, Matthew Handley, Rachel Nadas, George Farah, Rebecca Chang, Nicholas Jackson and Martha Guarnieri of Handley Farah & Anderson PLLC and Brent Johnson, Benjamin Brown, Daniel Silverman, Alison Deich, Zachary Glubiak, Louis Katz and Zachary Krowitz of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC.

Two-year-old Zion Gastelum died just days after dentists performed root canals and put crowns on six baby teeth at a clinic affiliated with a private equity firm.

His parents sued the Kool Smiles dental clinic in Yuma, Arizona, and its private equity investor, FFL Partners. They argued the procedures were done needlessly, in keeping with a corporate strategy to maximize profits by overtreating kids from lower-income families enrolled in Medicaid. Zion died after being diagnosed with “brain damage caused by a lack of oxygen,” according to the lawsuit.

Kool Smiles “overtreats, underperforms and overbills,” the family alleged in the suit, which was settled last year under confidential terms. FFL Partners and Kool Smiles had no comment but denied liability in court filings.

Private equity is rapidly moving to reshape health care in America, coming off a banner year in 2021, when the deep-pocketed firms plowed $206 billion into more than 1,400 health care acquisitions, according to industry tracker PitchBook.

Seeking quick returns, these investors are buying into eye care clinics, dental management chains, physician practices, hospices, pet care providers, and thousands of other companies that render medical care nearly from cradle to grave. Private equity-backed groups have even set up special “obstetric emergency departments” at some hospitals, which can charge expectant mothers hundreds of dollars extra for routine perinatal care.

As private equity extends its reach into health care, evidence is mounting that the penetration has led to higher prices and diminished quality of care, a KHN investigation has found. KHN found that companies owned or managed by private equity firms have agreed to pay fines of more than $500 million since 2014 to settle at least 34 lawsuits filed under the False Claims Act, a federal law that punishes false billing submissions to the federal government with fines. Most of the time, the private equity owners have avoided liability.

New research by the University of California-Berkeley has identified “hot spots” where private equity firms have quietly moved from having a small foothold to controlling more than two-thirds of the market for physician services such as anesthesiology and gastroenterology in 2021. And KHN found that in San Antonio, more than two dozen gastroenterology offices are controlled by a private equity-backed group that billed a patient $1,100 for her share of a colonoscopy charge — about three times what she paid in another state.

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‘Revenue Maximization’

Private equity firms often bring a “hands-on” approach to management, taking steps such as placing their representatives on a company’s board of directors and influencing the hiring and firing of key staffers.

“Private equity exercises immense control over the operations of health care companies it buys an interest in,” said Jeanne Markey, a Philadelphia whistleblower attorney.

Markey represented physician assistant Michelle O’Connor in a 2015 whistleblower lawsuit filed against National Spine and Pain Centers and its private equity owner, Sentinel Capital Partners.

In just a year under private equity guidance, National Spine’s patient load quadrupled as it grew into one of the nation’s largest pain management chains, treating more than 160,000 people in about 40 offices across five East Coast states, according to the suit.

O’Connor, who worked at two National Spine clinics in Virginia, said the mega-growth strategy sprang from a “corporate culture in which money trumps the provision of appropriate patient care,” according to the suit.

She cited a “revenue maximization” policy that mandated medical staffers see at least 25 patients a day, up from 16 to 18 before the takeover.

The pain clinics also overcharged Medicare by billing up to $1,100 for “unnecessary and often worthless” back braces and charging up to $1,800 each for urine drug tests that were “medically unnecessary and often worthless,” according to the suit.

In April 2019, National Spine paid the Justice Department $3.3 million to settle the whistleblower’s civil case without admitting wrongdoing.

Sentinel Capital Partners, which by that time had sold the pain management chain to another private equity firm, paid no part of National Spine’s settlement, court records show. Sentinel Capital Partners had no comment.

As the conveniences of electronic health records and data storage increase, so does the risk for personal information to be compromised and potentially used for nefarious means. According to the HIPAA Journal, between 2009 and 2021, “4,419 healthcare data breaches of 500 or more records” have occurred, “resulting in the loss, theft, exposure, or impermissible disclosure of 314,063,186 healthcare records.” This massive number is the equivalent of 95% of the 2021 United States population.

To find out what to do if your health data security has been breached, Patient Power asked attorney Douglas McNamara, a partner at Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll, a firm specializing in Cybersecurity and Data Breaches. He shared some key information and useful tips to consider.

What are the Possible Consequences of a Healthcare Data Breach?

“Data breaches can put you at risk for identity theft – where criminals use your information to open up loans in your name, apply for unemployment benefits, or file tax returns seeking your refund,” said McNamara.

In addition to financial losses, the very personal nature of the data disclosed in a healthcare breach can leave a patient at risk for extortion, insurance fraud, or even loss of access to important personal health information.

What Questions Should I Ask My Healthcare Provider?

According to McNamara, you should ask for a copy of any records that they think have been exposed. That way you can see exactly what sensitive information may now be in the wrong hands. For example, if your maiden name or child’s name is disclosed and you use either of these as part of any password information, then you have a better idea of what needs to be changed.

You should also ask if the data was encrypted or if they are offering any credit monitoring. “If they are, take it but don’t give up any rights. You should not have to release your rights to potential compensation if it turns out the healthcare provider was negligent or knew of the security incident earlier than they notified you,” McNamara said.

What is the First Thing I Should Do?

First and foremost, review all your financial accounts ASAP. There is a good chance that a cybercriminal will have access to your social security number and date of birth and could use this information to open bank accounts or loans in your name. Placing a credit freeze on your accounts and setting up fraud alerts through the major credit reporting agencies (Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion) is also important, noted McNamara.

If you have a health savings account (HSA) or a flexible spending account (FSA), be sure to change the passwords and monitor those accounts closely as well.

Also be on the lookout for any letters from the US post office verifying a change of address. If someone tries to file a change of address with your name, the post office will send out a letter of validation to confirm it was really you that initiated it.

What Steps Can I Take to Protect Myself?

Data breaches are unfortunately going to happen as hackers become more and more sophisticated. One of the best ways to protect yourself and your data, says McNamara, is to not reuse passwords and make sure you change them often. You should also be careful about giving out your social security number for use as a patient identifying number and remember to shred any medical bills you receive before throwing them away.

“Be proactive,” says McNamara. “If you have credit monitoring services through your credit card or another service (Equifax for example), take advantage of it.” You can get a free copy of your credit report once a year from each of the 3 credit reporting bureaus.

More Resources

McNamara pointed out that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) also offers a comprehensive checklist on their website that helps guide you on what to do if you’ve been the victim of a data breach.

Read What to Do if Your Healthcare Data is Breached

A prescription middleman on Friday confirmed that it has promised to pay Ohio $15 million to settle fraud claims against it. When the state announced the deal two days earlier, the company denied it had been finalized.

Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost on Wednesday announced that pharmacy benefit manager OptumRx had agreed to pay $15 million to settle a 2019 lawsuit accusing it of overbilling the Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation between 2015 and 2018, in part by not providing contractually guaranteed discounts.

But late that afternoon, a spokesman for the company, Andrew Krejci, denied that was the case, saying, “We continue to dispute his allegations and are honored to have delivered access to more affordable prescription medications for the Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation and Ohio taxpayers.”

Optum is part of UnitedHealth Group, the nation’s fifth-largest company and owner of the largest health insurer. As a pharmacy benefit manager, Optum has great sway over prescription-drug transactions, including deciding which drugs are covered, negotiating non-transparent rebates with drugmakers and determining how much to reimburse the pharmacies that dispense them.

Optum, CVS Caremark and Express Scripts control more than 70% of that marketplace. Critics allege that they use their size and a lack of transparency to inflate their profits and the ultimate cost of drugs.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday rejected Turkey’s bid to shut down lawsuits in U.S. courts stemming from a violent brawl outside the Turkish ambassador’s residence in Washington more than five years ago that left anti-government protesters badly beaten.

The justices did not comment in turning away Turkey’s arguments that American law shields foreign countries from most lawsuits. Lower courts ruled that those protections did not extend to the events of May 16, 2017, when during a visit by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, “Turkish security forces violently clashed with a crowd of protesters,” as one judge described the situation.

The Supreme Court’s action allows the lawsuits to proceed. In the lawsuits, protesters claim they were brutally punched and kicked, cursed at and greeted with slurs and throat-slashing gestures. One woman slipped in and out of consciousness and has suffered seizures, and others reported post-traumatic stress, depression, concussions and nightmares, according to the complaints.

Facing a lawsuit and enrollment caps, a local senior-care company tries to make a comeback.

During InnovAge’s Sept. 13 earnings call, CEO Patrick Blair spoke like a man who was watching a family member recover from a serious illness. In this case, however, that family member was the Denver-based senior-care company that Blair runs.

In early March of 2021, InnovAge (Nasdaq: INNV) was a company drawing all sorts of positive attention. It had just gone public, garnered an enterprise value of $3.75 billion and come off a five-year period in which revenue grew by 143%.

But on March 10 of that year, the Colorado-born company that had started life as nonprofit Total Longterm Care received a letter from the Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing saying it had gotten a complaint about its Thornton facility. The complaint alleged that clinical staffing at the center was “dangerously low,” caseloads were far too high and preventable acute medical issues had afflicted multiple patients at the facility.

A year and a half later, shares that once traded at $25.98 reached a nadir of $3.50. InnovAge patient enrollment is frozen in Colorado, where 47% of its business resides, as well as in Northern California, until it completes corrective action plans. And the company is the subject of a civil lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court of Colorado by three investor public pension funds that claims officials, including a departed CEO, made “materially false and misleading” statements about the company that caused investors to put their money into the firm only to lose millions of dollars as its value plummeted.

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“I think what our complaint does show is there were systemic issues well before they did the IPO,” said Julie Goldsmith Reiser, a Washington, D.C., attorney who is leading the team seeking unspecified damages from the company, its current and former leaders and firms that aided it in going public. “My parents live across the country from me. I’m the type of person who could use this solution … To me, that’s why it’s important to get this story out.”

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Reiser, who filed the lawsuit, said it aims to recover the money lost by investors who bought into “one of the five worst-performing IPOs in 2021” and suffered because of what she claims was “a materially inaccurate registration statement and prospectus.” But she believes that the people speaking out through her efforts will hold sway on the federal and local agencies seeking to get InnovAge to change its practices — and fulfill the promises it’s made to frail patients and their families.

“I believe when you have regulatory agencies as involved as we have here … the amount of pressure that shareholders can exert is less than those regulatory agencies,” she said. “InnovAge will have to address those regulatory concerns if it wants to be viable.”