New Mexico Landmark Legal Settlements
U.S., media settle suit with Wen Ho Lee
Wen Ho Lee, a U.S. nuclear scientist once identified in news reports as the target of a spy investigation, received more than $1.6 million from the federal government and five media organizations to settle his lawsuit alleging that government leaks violated his privacy.
The United States paid Lee $895,000 to drop his lawsuit, filed in 1999, which alleged that officials in the Clinton administration disclosed to the news media that he was under investigation for spying for China while working at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
Additionally, the five news organizations agreed to pay Lee $750,000 out of concern that courts would order reporters to reveal the names of their government sources.
$2.8M settlement in Los Alamos breach
In 2007, the Department of Energy reached a $2.8 million settlement with the University of California over a security breakdown at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The penalty stems from an October 2006 incident, in which Los Alamos police discovered more than 1,000 pages of classified documents and several computer storage devices during a drug bust at the trailer of a former worker for a lab subcontractor. The university was the sole manager of the northern New Mexico nuclear weapons laboratory for the Department of Energy until June 2006.
Cigna unit agrees to pay $24.5 million to settle false claims case in Medicare fraud lawsuit
In 2002, Lovelace Health System agreed to pay the federal government a record $24.5 million to settle a whistleblower lawsuit alleging the hospital routinely mischaracterized and overstated its expenses to increase its Medicare reimbursement by tens of millions of dollars.
Lovelace, based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, defrauded the Medicare program by making false claims for reimbursement in "cost reports" and "cost-report re-openings" from 1988 to 1998, according to the whistleblower lawsuit and government charges. Lovelace also failed to report that it had received Medicare over-payments.
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