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Patrick Britton-Harr has been ordered to appear in Baltimore on July 31 for a hearing in federal court that could lead to his jailing.
U.S. District Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander ordered the hearing after federal prosecutors requested the owner and founder of Sarasota-based air service company AeroVanti be held in contempt a second time for allegedly violating court orders in a Medicare fraud case.
Prosecutors asked the judge for the hearing to force Britton-Harr to explain why he has not complied with discovery orders to disclose his finances after filing a status report detailing why he did not pay $575,000 as ordered in March.
In her order posted Monday to the federal court system’s online case files, Hollander writes that “The defendant’s claim of lack of funds to satisfy the court’s order does not relieve him of his obligation to respond to the government’s discovery requests, as ordered by the court. Of import, under (the law), a district court has the authority to use detention or incarceration as a means of coercing compliance in civil cases.”
“In other words,” she adds, “a court may issue a bench warrant for the arrest and incarceration of a contemnor, in order to compel compliance.”
The hearing is set for 10 a.m. at the federal courthouse on Lombard Street in Baltimore.
Britton-Harr was found in contempt the first time March 4 after he sold an Annapolis, Maryland, home days after a $30 million judgement was filed against him and several companies he owns that had been charged with committing Medicare fraud.
The money from the sale, which violated a court order, was then allegedly transferred to AeroVanti, the Sarasota company that’s been hit with more than a dozen lawsuits and default judgements from clients, employees and vendors accusing it of misappropriating funds and failing to make payments as its planes sat unrepaired or were repossessed.
Britton-Harr was to have paid the $575,000 fine by the end of April or provide a status report as to why he couldn’t come up with the money. In that status report, he wrote that he had no bank account and was depending on the charity of others.
Prosecutors asked that he provide proof of his financial status while accusing him of creating “a myriad of shell companies and bank accounts to frustrate the tracking of his assets.”
An attorney, who has since withdrawn from the case, did send prosecutors an email April 12 with three bank statements for a bank account in Britton-Harr’s wife’s name. The statements, prosecutors say, included multiple large wire transfers to unknown persons for unknown purposes.
Hollander, in her order, writes that in addition to explaining why he has not complied with court orders, Britton-Harr “shall be asked to explain why he has failed to produce evidence supporting his claim that the proceeds of the sale of the Cornhill Street residence were sent to AeroVanti and used to pay corporate debts, and the details of his current financial resources as well as any prior dissipation of assets.”
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