Former executives of Outcome Health who were recently convicted of fraud have filed a notice that they will appeal the convictions.
Outcome’s former CEO and co-founder Rishi Shah and former co-founder and president Shraddha Agarwal filed appeals against the notices on Monday and Friday, respectively. Both are appealing their convictions to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.
A jury convicted the pair and a third former executive of fraud in April 2023.
Shah was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison by U.S. District Judge Thomas Durkin on June 26. “I believe much of this crime was motivated by greed,” Durkin said in his sentencing. Agarwal was sentenced to three years in a rehabilitation facility.
Shah and Agarwal’s company was once one of Chicago’s fastest-growing technology startups. Outcome sold advertising to pharmaceutical companies, which then ran the ads on TV screens and tablets that Outcome placed in doctor’s offices and waiting rooms. But government prosecutors alleged that the trio lied about the number of screens they had in doctor’s offices, overcharged drug companies and inflated revenue to raise money from investors and secure loans.
After the guilty verdicts, Shah and Agarwal’s lawyers argued in U.S. District Court that they were unable to hire their first-choice lawyers for the trial because large sums of money had been frozen before the trial began.
But Judge Durkin denied Shah and Agarwal’s motions for a new trial or to dismiss the indictment, writing that because Shah and Agarwal failed to contest that the asset seizures were too broad before trial, they could not contest them after trial. He also wrote that even if few assets had been frozen before trial, they would not have had enough liquid assets to hire the lawyers they wanted.
“Mr. Shah’s appeal will focus on the government’s admission that it excessively suppressed millions of dollars’ worth of unrelated assets, which prevented Mr. Shah from retaining his original counsel, Bill Burke of Quinn Emanuel,” Shah’s attorney, Richard Finneran, said in an emailed statement to the Tribune. “This is a serious violation of Mr. Shah’s constitutional rights, and we intend to assert those rights in the Court of Appeals and, if necessary, before the U.S. Supreme Court.”
Shah has also hired former acting U.S. attorney Neel Katyal to help him appeal his conviction.
