Jury awards ex-Cardiovascular Systems employee $25.1 million in whistleblower lawsuit
A jury in Los Angeles this week awarded former Cardiovascular Systems sales manager Steven Babyak more than $25 million in damages related to a whistleblower and wrongful termination lawsuit he filed against the company.
Babyak was awarded $22.4 million in punitive damages and $2.7 million in general damages.
CSI plans on appealing the decision, according to an 8-K filing with the SEC.
Bayak, who was a regional sales manager in Southern California for nearly three years, filed the lawsuit in Nov. 2015. He claimed that he spoke with management, human resources and corporate legal counsel numerous times about patient safety issues and violations of laws. He was terminated in June 2015, which he claimed had to do with his repeated complaints.
“CSI fired our client after he alerted upper management of an illegal scheme of kickbacks to doctors as well as violations of the Sarbanes Oxley Act,” Tamara Freeze and Robert Odell, Babyak’s attorneys with Workplace Justice Advocates, PLC, said in a news release. “We hope that CSI's board of directors will take decisive action against the executives who terminated Mr. Babyak and then tried to cover it up. What they did was outrageous and the jury unanimously agreed.”
In June 2016, Cardiovascular Systems agreed to pay $8 million to settle allegations that the company paid kickbacks to physicians to convince them to use its medical devices. Travis Thams, a former employee, filed the civil lawsuit in July 2013. He alleged that the company developed and distributed marketing materials to promote use of its products and coordinated meetings between utilizing physicians and referring physicians.
Executive Editor
Tim Casey joined TriMed Media Group in 2015 as Executive Editor. For the previous four years, he worked as an editor and writer for HMP Communications, primarily focused on covering managed care issues and reporting from medical and health care conferences. He was also a staff reporter at the Sacramento Bee for more than four years covering professional, college and high school sports. He earned his undergraduate degree in psychology from the University of Notre Dame and his MBA degree from Georgetown University.