COLTS NECK, NJ — The ex-CEO of a publicly traded healthcare services company was sentenced to time in prison for his role in a conspiracy to defraud investors in connection with the purchase or sale of the company’s securities, U.S. Attorney Robert Frazer said.
Parmjit Parmar (also known as Paul Parmar), 55, of Colts Neck, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit securities fraud before U.S. District Judge Madeline Cox Arleo on May 7, 2025.
Parmar was sentenced to 60 months’ imprisonment, three years’ supervised release, and ordered to pay more than $125 million in victim restitution, Frazer said.
From May 2015 through September 2017, authorities accused Parmar and others of orchestrating a scheme to defraud a private investment firm and others out of hundreds of millions of dollars in connection with the funding of a transaction to take a healthcare services company private, which was traded publicly on the London Stock Exchange’s Alternative Investment Market.
To fund the transaction, authorities said the private investment firm put up about $82.5 million, and a consortium of financial institutions put up another $130 million, for a total of about $212.5 million.
The scheme used fraudulent methods to grossly inflate the value of the company and tricked others into believing that it was worth substantially more than its actual value, Frazer said.
According to authorities, Parmar and his accused co-conspirators sought to raise tens of millions of dollars in the public markets, purportedly to fund the company’s acquisitions of various operating subsidiaries.
In reality, a number of those entities either did not exist or had only a fraction of the operating income attributed to them, Frazer said.
Parmar and others are accused of funneling the proceeds of these secondary offerings through bank accounts they controlled and using the money for purposes that had nothing to do with acquiring the purported targets.
Authorities said they then went to “great lengths” to make it seem like these funds were revenue, concocting phony customers and altering bank statements to make it appear as if the funds were coming from customers.
To perpetuate the scheme, authorities said they also falsified and fabricated bank records of subsidiary entities in order to generate a phony picture of Comrevenue streams and made material misrepresentations and omissions to the private investment firm and others.
These actions led to the victims valuing the company at over $300 million for purposes of financing the transaction to take the company private, Frazer said.
The scheme was uncovered in September 2017, when Parmar and two others, who were named in court documents (Sotirios Zaharis and Ravi Chivukula), resigned from their positions with the company or were terminated.
On March 16, 2018, the company and multiple of its affiliated entities filed for bankruptcy, authorities said, attributing the company’s financial demise, in large part, to the fraud scheme.
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