PROVIDENCE (RI)
Rhode Island Public Radio
June 19, 2018
By Lynn Arditi
The Roman Catholic Bishop of Providence and hospital operator Prospect Chartercare, LLC are among the defendants accused of conspiracy and fraud in two class-action lawsuits filed late Monday.
The suits filed in state and federal courts accuse Bishop Thomas Tobin and hospital operators of deliberately underfunding St. Joseph Health Services’s pension plan and then lying about the plan’s financial condition to beneficiaries.
The plan — which covers at least 2,700 current and former employees of Our Lady of Fatima Hospital — was left with no source of revenue when the Fatima hospital was sold in 2014 to Prospect Charter, the local arm of the California-based for profit Prospect Medical Holdings. The pension plan is currently in receivership, a form of bankrupty.
The pension was set up as a “church plan,” which meant it was not federally insured and did not have the same funding requirements as plans covered under the federal Employee Retirement Security Act, or ERISA. The federal lawsuit, however, says the plan did not qualify as a much plan at least since 2009, meaning the plan’s operators would have been required to meet specific funding thresholds.
The suit, which asks for unspecified damages, names more than a dozen defendants, including the for-profit Californian-based parent of CharterCare, prospect Medical Holdings, Inc; Roger Williams Medical Center, LLC, The Rhode Island Community Foundation and the Angell Pension Group, Inc.
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