Abbott Accused of Firing Manager for Reporting Kickback Schemes

A former senior district sales manager for an Abbott Laboratories Inc. subsidiary says the company violated the False Claims Act by firing him in retaliation for reporting kickback schemes to encourage a medical device customer to make purchases.

The termination was “obviously retaliatory,” Krishnan Ghosh says, because Abbott and its subsidiary Cardiovascular Systems Inc. spent weeks in pre-employment negotiations seeking to hire Ghosh, while competing in a bidding war against two other companies for his services, according to a May 29 complaint with the US District Court for the District of Hawaii.

This complaint comes a few months after the ...