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Terre Haute Tribune-StarTERRE HAUTE — Until the past year, an august northern Indiana company, Zimmer Holdings, was pretty much going about business as usual: manufacturing a broad array of medical devices, such as hip and knee replacement implants, expanding operations in the United States and 25 nations, and racking up annual sales of nearly $4 billion.
Then Zimmer, with headquarters in Warsaw, got into some hot water with the federal government.
... Four of the five companies, including Zimmer, were smacked with fines totaling about $311 million. All five agreed to an increasingly popular method of avoiding trial-and-punishment in federal court. The legal remedy is known as “deferred prosecution” and relies on an outside, independent “monitor” who oversees the compliance portion of the corporation’s effort to straighten up its act.
... The name of the monitor assigned to supervise Zimmer’s corporate integrity agreement for 18 months caught many an eye: Former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft.
... Depending on the workload, Ashcroft will charge Zimmer between $28 million and $52 million for monitoring services.
... But even a potential $52-million haul for Ashcroft is not what brought deferred prosecutions to public — and Congressional — attention. Rather, it is the fact that Ashcroft got the no-bid, no-public-notice contract from someone who used to call him “boss.”
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http://www.tribstar.com/opinion/local_story_054222256.html