LAS VEGAS (KTNV) — A Las Vegas man has been sentenced to spend over three years in federal prison for conspiring to fix nurse wages.
On Friday, a federal district court sentenced Eduardo "Eddie" Lopez.
Lopez held executive positions at three different home health agencies where he oversaw recruitment, hiring, retention and assignments of nurses and healthcare staff, according to a federal indictment.
From March 2016 and May 2019, prosecutors said Lopez worked with other co-conspirators to "suppress and eliminate competition" for the services of nurses.
More charges were later added after Lopez sold his healthcare staffing company in Dec. 2021 for over $10 million and "falsely presented to the buyer of his company that federal law enforcement was not investigating him or his company."
However, investigators said Lopez knew that was false because FBI special agents had questioned him and served him with a grand jury subpoena.
Lopez has been sentenced to 40 months, or about three years and three months, in custody and was fined $550,000 in criminal fines. Lopez was also ordered to pay nearly $2.5 million in restitution to the person who was defrauded when they purchased Lopez's home health company. Lopez must also forfeit the over $10 million that he received from that sale.
“Wage-fixing is a brazen crime rightly punished by a lengthy period of incarceration. The dignity of work in return for a fair wage is core to our free-market enterprise system. The Defendant — a convicted antitrust criminal — profited at the expense of his employees and the unwitting buyer of his home healthcare company.” said Assistant Attorney General Abigail A. Slater of the Antitrust Division. “Far from being a mere 'technical violation,' wage-fixing is a real crime that harms innocent people — in this case nurses — and today’s sentence — the Justice Department’s first-ever wage-fixing conviction — reflects that such conduct will not be resolved with a fine.”
