Indian-origin former CEO sentenced to 5 years in prison over $212 million fraud in New Jersey, asked to pay $125 million

Parmjit Parmar, a 55-year-old Indian-origin man from New Jersey, has been sentenced to five years in jail, followed by three years' supervised release and a payment of $125 million over his involvement in a large-scale conspiracy to defraud investors, in connection with the purchase or sale of the company's securities. Parmar, also known as Paul Parmer, had pleaded guilty in 2025.

According to the court documents, the fraud was conducted between May 2015 through September 2017. Parmar and his conspirators, including Sotirios Zaharis, aka, 'Sam Zaharis', and Ravi Chivukula orchestrated an elaborate 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 traded publicly on the London Stock Exchange’s Alternative Investment Market private.

To fund the transaction, the private investment firm put up approximately $82.5 million and a consortium of financial institutions put up another $130 million, for a total of approximately $212.5 million. The co-conspirators utilized 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.

Parmar and the 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. The court documents said that the conspirators funneled the proceeds of these secondary offerings through bank accounts they controlled and used the money for a variety of purposes that had nothing to do with acquiring the purported targets. The conspirators went to great lengths to make it appear that these funds were revenue, concocting phony customers and altering bank statements to make it appear as if the funds were coming from customers.

Parmar and his conspirators 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, the court said.

Parmar and his conspirators’ actions caused victims to value the company at more than $300 million for purposes of financing the transaction to take the company private. The scheme was uncovered in September 2017, when Parmar and his conspirators resigned from their positions with the company or were terminated. On March 16, 2018, the company and numerous of its affiliated entities filed for bankruptcy, attributing the company’s financial demise, in large part, to the fraud scheme.