Gynecologist from Chesapeake, Dr. Javaid Perwaiz, was found guilty of several charges in court on Monday, 52 out of the total 61 charges. He was found not guilty of eight charges and one count was left undecided in court.
Perwaiz stood accused of conducting many unnecessary hysterectomies and removing fallopian tubes and ovaries over a period of nine years in Suffolk, Portsmouth and Chesapeake. It is believed that he made a total of $2.4 million from the unnecessary of almost three dozen women between 2010 and 2019.
U.S. Attorney Elisabeth Yusi said to the jury, in her closing arguments, that Perwaiz needed the money to maintain his very lavish lifestyle. He had a number of expensive cars, fur coats and $800,000 in shopping charges.
According to the prosecution, the man had a scheme. This meant falsifying due dates, inducing women to give birth early, making up cancer scares and false symptoms to encourage surgery and performing diagnostic tests with faulty and broken equipment. This was all done in an effort to bill insurance companies.
Perwaiz’s sentence hearing has been set for 32 March 2021. The maximum penalty that he might be facing is 465 years.
According to the Virginian Pilot, the prosecution proved that Perwaiz time and again failed to inform insurance companies that in 1996, he’d pleaded guilty to felony tax evasion and in 1983, his privileges in one hospital were temporarily suspended because he had been found to have performed a dozen unnecessary surgeries.
Many former patients testified against him, stating that they suffered from pain and other complications due to the surgeries. They revealed that they had agreed to the surgery because they had trusted him or because they’d been told that they had cancer or would develop it.
The man was charged with 11 felonies, which included health care fraud, aggravated identity theft and false statements related to health care matters in 2019.