Former Valpo businessman gets prison time, lied to protect secret millions

A former Valparaiso businessman who federal prosecutors say lived in Canada for seven years to avoid an obstruction and perjury trial has been sentenced to not quite two years in prison, after finally admitting that he lied under oath to protect an offshore account worth millions of dollars from creditors.
Peter Rogan, 69, had been hoping for a sentence of 12 months and a day.
What he got on Wednesday, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, in Chicago, was 21 months, the maximum possible under the plea agreement.
In September Rogan pleaded guilty to perjury, acknowledging that he had control of a Bahamian trust established for the purpose of protecting his assets from $188 million in judgments awarded the government and a bank creditor; acknowledging as well that he made–and caused his legal counsel to make–false representations about his control over the offshore trust.
Rogan’s “conduct was abundantly contemptuous and lucrative (he has avoided tens of millions of dollars in judgments and wasted precious and limited resources of party litigants), as well as exceedingly difficult to detect, investigate, and prosecute,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros stated in a pre-sentencing memorandum.
“Given the seriousness and egregiousness of the defendant’s criminal conduct–and the more-than-a-decade’s worth of the defendant’s lies, obstruction, contempt, and conspiratorial conduct, all of which imposed a heavy price on the litigants, the victims, the judiciary, and the criminal justice system as a whole–this is one of those cases where the government is bound to seek a maximum term of imprisonment,” Boutros noted.
Rogan was originally charged with obstruction and perjury in 2008, two years after the U.S. government won a $64.2 million judgment against him and one year after Dexia Credit Local won a $124 million default judgment, both related to a healthcare fraud investigation going back years.
Rogan was in Canada at the time and rather than return to the U.S. to face those charges in court, Boutros stated, he “affirmatively chose to seek refuge behind Canadian law where he remained a fugitive for more than seven years as he intensely resisted extradition and removal proceedings in Canada before suddenly and unexpectedly returning to Chicago in June 2015.”
Even after returning to the U.S., however, Rogan continued to lie, Boutros added. Thus Rogan told Pretrial Services “that he had no assets and that his income was limited to $800 a month Social Security income.” But lease records obtained from Canada, Boutros stated, indicate that Rogan had been paying CAD $4,000 to $5,000 monthly to rent a penthouse apartment in Vancouver.
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 U.S. Attorney’s Office said in a statement released last month announcing Rogan’s plea.
The $64.2 million judgment against Rogan was made following a civil trial in 2006, “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 its $124 million default judgment against Rogan.
Then, 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 finally admitted, as part of the plea agreement, that in fact his affidavit was “false and misleading” and that he lied to Dexia.