Court Again Rejects False Claims Act Suit Against UScellular
The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia dismissed additional False Claims Act actions brought by lawyers Mark O’Connor and Sara Leibman, who allege defendants fraudulently said Frequency Advantage was a “very small business” qualifying for “designated entity” status…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Export Compliance Daily combines U.S. export control news, foreign border import regulation and policy developments into a single daily information service that reliably informs its trade professional readers about important current issues affecting their operations.
and a bidding discount in FCC auctions. The case was brought against UScellular and other defendants including King Street, Carroll Wireless and Barat Wireless. The court earlier dismissed other complaints (see 2303100068). The latest complaints dismissed, ECF Nos. 148 and 149, involve three FCC spectrum auctions in 2004, 2006 and 2007. The court said a 2008 FCA complaint precludes the later complaint. “Because the Amended Complaint is premised on ‘substantially the same allegations or transactions’ that have already been publicly disclosed, Plaintiffs-Relators' suit must be dismissed unless they qualify as an ‘original source’ by obtaining and sharing ‘knowledge that is independent of and materially adds to the publicly disclosed allegations or transactions,’ in which case the public disclosure bar would not apply,” the court said. Plaintiffs repeatedly cite a U.S. Cellular-King Street network sharing agreement from 2011, the court said: “They rely chiefly on one nonpublic document, but it cannot bear the weight they place on it. … That alleged relationship between the entities at most supports the claim that Defendants continued the substantially similar, and already disclosed, original fraud. It therefore cannot be a material addition to the publicly disclosed information.”