Loretto Hospital’s indicted former chief financial officer has returned to the United States and is being held in Chicago’s federal jail, arriving just as a new grand jury accused him of scamming the federal government out of roughly $200 million, the Chicago Sun-Times has confirmed.
Anosh Ahmed may now try to take advantage of a months-long scandal in the office of U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros to try to have his charges thrown out. No such motion has been filed, but Ahmed is set to be arraigned on the new indictment Monday morning.
The feds will likely use the new indictment against Ahmed to avoid that outcome. It was handed up Thursday, secured in an effort to replace a set of previously tainted charges. But the judge presiding over the case is clearly bothered by the scandal, which involves misconduct before grand jurors.
Ahmed, 42, is being held in the Metropolitan Correctional Center, records show. He’s been under indictment in Chicago since 2024, when he was originally accused of scheming with others to embezzle more than $15 million out of the safety net hospital on Chicago’s West Side. Those charges are still pending.
Then, in 2025, a grand jury handed up an indictment accusing him of a COVID-19 testing scheme that defrauded the federal government out of hundreds of millions of dollars.
The probe of Ahmed and Loretto Hospital dates back to 2021, when Block Club Chicago reported the hospital had shared COVID-19 vaccines with employees at Trump Tower, where Ahmed had a condo. The vaccines were just becoming available and were still rare.
Six people were charged along with Ahmed in the two separate cases. Meanwhile, Ahmed left Chicago for France and Dubai in August 2023 after he became aware of the investigation, federal prosecutors have said. He was taken into custody in Serbia last November.
His attorneys denied he was a fugitive, saying his return to the United States was delayed because of “several significant family health issues.”
Meanwhile, the cases against his co-defendants began to collapse this summer following revelations of prosecutor misconduct involving the “Broadview Six,” a group of Operation Midway Blitz protesters accused of a conspiracy to impede a federal officer.
Boutros dropped the charges against the “Broadview Six” after a judge revealed that Assistant U.S. Attorney Sheri Mecklenburg acted improperly before the grand jury.
Mecklenburg also handled the cases against Ahmed and his co-defendants, and she’s since been accused of similar wrongdoing in that prosecution.
No hearing has been held over the allegations against Mecklenburg, a point of growing frustration in the legal community.
U.S. District Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman presides over the case brought against Ahmed in 2025. She threatened in June to hold a hearing over the Mecklenburg scandal. That hearing likely would have seen Boutros summoned to the witness stand, in addition to Mecklenburg.
Boutros’ office avoided the hearing by quickly — and permanently — dropping criminal charges against two of Ahmed’s co-defendants. The feds have since worked to strike deals with the remaining four.
But when Ahmed’s lawyers sought similar relief, Coleman said he’d first have to be “arraigned, in-person, before this court.”
The news that he’d agreed to return to the United States came about two weeks later.
Former U.S. Attorney Dan Webb and others from the Winston Taylor LLP law firm have filed appearances on Ahmed’s behalf in recent days. But they’ve yet to file a new motion for dismissal.
If Coleman agrees to a hearing, Boutros’ office could face a critical decision: Drop charges against a man accused of scheming hundreds of millions out of the federal government, or go forward with the hearing even after it permanently dropped charges in an apparent effort to avoid it.
The feds will likely argue any taint from Mecklenburg was cured when they secured a new indictment against Ahmed. But Coleman is clearly interested in getting to the bottom of what’s been going on in the U.S. attorney’s office.
She warned prosecutors in June that a hearing was “still a possibility.”
“I’m not saying that’s over with,” she said.