Jamaica-born doctor disputes criminal case against him

Lester Hinds/Gleaner Writer

Dr Kingsley Chin, the Jamaica-born operator of a medical device manufacturing company in the United States is disputing a US Federal case against him.

Chin, a medical doctor has been charged along with several others with conspiracy, money laundering and violating anti-kickback laws.

READ: Jamaica-born US doctor charged in bribery, money laundering scheme

The criminal charges followed a civil lawsuit filed by the Justice Department in March 2020.

At the time, prosecutors accused Chin, his company, SpineFrontier, the chief financial officer and several others of incentivising surgeons to use the company's products through kickback payments, allegedly leading to more than $100 million in product sales.

The revenue includes money received in claims on the US government's insurance programme.

Under the alleged scheme, SpineFrontier and Chin paid the doctors “sham” consulting fees between $32,000 and $978,000, according to the court documents.

Chin, 57, resides in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

He told The Gleaner that he and his company have been caught up in a push by the government to crack down on medical companies using doctors as consultants.

According to Chin, he was blindsided by the criminal complaint unsealed against him last Tuesday.

“We basically had an agreement to settle the civil case but the government made a demand that I was not prepared to live with so we opted to go to trial,” he said.

He said, on Tuesday morning, about 15 federal marshals turned up at his house with guns drawn to take him into custody.

“In civil cases this does not happen. The criminal complaint caught myself and my lawyers completely by surprise. In any case, this is normally handled by the suspect being asked to come to surrender to a police station,” he said.

Chin has been released on a US$1 million bail.

He is expected to be arraigned early this week in Boston where his company is located and where the alleged crimes are said to have occurred.

Insisting that he has not done anything wrong, Chin said between 2013 and 2015 it was customary for medical device manufacturers to have doctors as consultants who also would provide product feedback and review to the companies.

According to Chin, such consultants were opinion leaders who charged a fee at rates that were acceptable.

He said that when the practise changed in 2018, the federal government began going after companies and would scrutinise their books to determine if there were discrepancies in payments.

“Everybody was going to be hit after the clampdown,” he said.

He feels that the federal authorities have brought the charges of bribery, money laundering and violations of the anti-kickback law because his company did not have all the documents to match up with the payments, but insisted that this should fall to the doctors who billed his company.

The federal authorities have accused him of paying out some US$8 million to doctors.

But Chin insists that he has had no consultants for the past 4-5 years.

“I gamble to go to court on the civil matter and it turned into a criminal complaints,” he said, adding that he is prepared to fight.

Who is Kingsley Chin?

He hails from Buff Bay in Portland.

He attended Titchfield High School and played DaCosta Cup Football for that school.

He was selected to be a member of the Jamaica Juvenile Soccer team and was later given a soccer scholarship to Columbia University in New York in 1984.

At Columbia, he became the first black president of an ivy league school senior class.

He was also selected as the ivy league soccer player of the year in 1989.

Recalling his upbringing, he said that his mother worked in a supermarket to be able to provide for his education, something she was invested in.

After graduating Columbia with an engineering degree, Chin worked for a few years before going to Harvard Medical School.

An orthopaedic surgeon, Chin's company manufactured medical spinal devices.

According to him, he currently holds about 50 such patents.

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