Valpo attorney pleads to perjury and admits lying to protect secret offshore millions

A former Valparaiso man has admitted lying about his control of a Bahamian trust account worth millions of dollars, for the purpose of stonewalling attempts to collect $188 million in civil judgments against him.

On Tuesday, Peter G. Rogan, 69, pleaded guilty to perjury in the U.S. District Court in Chicago, according to a statement released by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois.

“Rogan acknowledged that he had control over the money and its distribution to beneficiaries, and that he had established the trust to protect his assets from judgment creditors,” the statement said. “Rogan also admitted that he willfully violated several court orders in a bank creditor lawsuit, when he made–and caused his legal counsel to make–false representations to the court about his control over the offshore trust.”

Rogan, who pleaded guilty to one count of perjury, is facing a prison sentence of 12 to 21 months. Sentencing has been scheduled for Oct. 14.

Rogan is the former owner of a hospital on Chicago’s North Side, the Edgewater Medical Center. That facility closed in 2001, “amidst a federal criminal investigation that resulted in healthcare fraud convictions of a Rogan-owned management company, a hospital administrator, and several doctors, the latter of whom performed medically unnecessary surgical procedures and treatments on unsuspecting patients,” the statement said.

Following a civil trial in 2006, the U.S. government obtained a judgment of $64.2 million against Rogan, “for his role in Edgewater’s submission of false claims for reimbursement under the Medicare program,” the statement said.

In a separate civil trial in 2007, Dexia Credit Local, which had extended credit financing to the Edgewater Medical Center, won a $124 million default judgment Rogan and his companies, the statement said.

As part of their efforts to recover the judgments against Rogan, the U.S. government and Dexia Credit Local discovered that Rogan had “millions of dollars in secret offshore assets” being held in a Bahamian trust account which he had created with the help of a former Valparaiso attorney, Frederick M. Cuppy, who previously pleaded guilty to perjury and was sentenced in 2013 to a year and a day in prison, the statement said.

In December 2006, Rogan filed an affidavit specifically denying that he controlled the assets in the offshore account sought by the U.S. government, the statement said. In connection with the Dexia litigation, Rogan also denied any control of the account and had his attorneys deny it as well.

Rogan is now admitting, as part of the plea agreement announced on Tuesday, that in fact his affidavit was “false and misleading” and that he lied to Dexia, the statement said.