Anosh Ahmed pleaded not guilty on Monday to a federal indictment accusing him of trying to get nearly $700 million from the government through fake COVID-19 tests, a sharper and more expansive charge than the case he faced only days earlier. He was arraigned before U.S. District Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman on the separate testing counts while he remained jailed at the Metropolitan Correctional Center.
The plea came after Ahmed returned to the United States last week following two years overseas. It also came after he had already pleaded not guilty on Friday to charges that he embezzled $15 million from Loretto Hospital, a case that is separate from the testing allegations now moving through court.
What makes the testing case a live search topic now is the size of the alleged fraud and the pace of the government’s case. Prosecutors say the updated indictment came from a grand jury convened in January, replacing earlier testing charges that dated to a June 2024 grand jury. The numbers are stark: the government says the fake billing scheme was aimed at nearly $700 million, while Mohamed “Siraj” Sirajudeen has already admitted in a plea deal to trying to defraud the federal government of $900 million through the same testing operation.
Sirajudeen’s plea carries weight because he agreed to cooperate against Ahmed. In his deal, he admitted paying more than $147 million to various Ahmed-owned companies from June 2021 through September 2021, a detail that prosecutors can now use to trace how the alleged scheme moved money while the pandemic testing business was supposedly operating.
That still leaves a legal fight in the background. Dan Webb, Ahmed’s defense lawyer, has said he would like to resolve the case reasonably quickly, but he has also indicated he might file a motion for prosecutorial misconduct over possible grand jury tampering. Prosecutors, meanwhile, have moved ahead with the updated indictment rather than waiting for that challenge to surface.
The case now turns on whether Webb files that motion and how Coleman handles it. With Ahmed back in custody, a cooperating co-defendant already in place, and a second indictment in hand, the government’s version of the testing case is now on the record — and the next courtroom filing may decide how much of it gets tested before trial.
