The Los Angeles Times reports that In 1998, Tigran Svadjian M.D. purchased the Southwest Medical Group from a man ensnared in a federal medical fraud investigation, according to court records. The man also had suspected ties to Armenian and Russian organized crime.
The man and dozens of other doctors were believed at the time to have overbilled the government at least $13 million for medical tests and procedures at its offices in Burbank, Ventura and San Francisco, news clippings from the time show.
Facing charges of healthcare fraud, Svadjian, a Newport Beach doctor, agreed to go undercover for federal prosecutors. But before he would wear a wire, he told them, he needed to visit his ailing mother in Russia.
He never returned. The day he was to appear in court in 2002, prosecutors received paperwork from a Russian morgue stating that, just a few days before on a Moscow street, Svadjian died of pneumonia. His remains were cremated and given to his mother, Margarita Petrosova.
More than 10 years passed before prosecutors asked a judge to dismiss the charges against Svadjian. In 2013, they discarded the evidence collected against him.The criminal case against Svadjian was over. His estate was divided up among creditors. His wife and children moved on with efforts to rebuild their lives.
But unbeknownst at the time, he actually ended up in the Egyptian town of Hurghada that had blossomed from a once-quiet fishing village stretching along the Red Sea to a beach resort that drew tourists with immaculate hotels and charming night life.
It was there, in late 2002, that Vasily Petrosov found a home and began earning a living as a part-time scuba instructor. He fell in love with a woman from Sochi, Russia, a resort city on the coast of the Black Sea. In 2012, the couple had their first child, a son. Things were looking up for Petrosov and by the end of last year, he expected a second child.
But this would be a difficult pregnancy, and would require a caesarean procedure. Petrosov’s girlfriend flew back to her hometown, where the medical care would be better. There she would wait for him.
Petrosov did not have a passport. The one he had was fake, and authorities seized it when he tried to renew it in Russia years before. Petrosov contacted a Lithuanian friend in Hurghada and purchased another fake passport. Petrosov became Viktoras Cajevkis. A Lithuanian. Armed with his passport and other documents, Cajevkis left Egypt for Russia – with a stop in the Ukraine.
But authorities in Kiev soon realized his passport was fraudulent and sent him back to Hurghada, where Egyptian police arrested him on July 31. Determined to find out who he really was, they searched his apartment, which yielded a canceled American passport with another name. Tigran Svadjian.
Svadjian now sits in a federal holding cell in downtown L.A, where he faces only a single charge of unlawful flight to avoid prosecution, which carries a maximum five-year sentence – half what he faced before he vanished. Prosecutors said they expect to reach a plea agreement with Svadjian by mid-November and won’t prosecute him on the old, and much more serious, Medi-Cal fraud charges.
While Svadjian was abroad, the state Department of Health and Human Services sought a judge’s order to allow them to take his family’s home in a gated Newport Beach neighborhood. The state gave up its fight in 2005 and a year later, Emilya Svadjian divided her ex-husband’s $63,000 in assets among the family. Her claim on his life insurance was rejected.
But the FBI said she managed to empty out a Swiss bank account Svadjian maintained with $3 million.
