AeroVanti Founder Patrick Britton-Harr Convicted of $18.7M Medicare Fraud, Months After Fraud Conviction Over Jet Club Customers

A federal jury found Patrick Britton-Harr, founder of the private jet company AeroVanti, guilty of five counts of health care fraud and one count of transactional money laundering. The Justice Department announced the verdict in an Oct. 21 news release. The case was tried in Maryland.

Through his company Provista Health, Britton-Harr billed Medicare $18.7 million for respiratory tests that nursing home residents did not need, physicians did not order and, in many cases, were never performed. Medicare paid more than $7.2 million, the department said. He had offered COVID-19 testing services to nursing homes across the country in 2020; after specimens were collected, he billed Medicare for separate, expensive respiratory pathogen panel tests purportedly performed at his Arizona laboratory, falsely claiming treating physicians had ordered them.

The department said Britton-Harr used the proceeds to buy a $112,500 Porsche 911 and to make $25,000 monthly mortgage payments on his Annapolis waterfront mansion. Kelly O. Hayes, U.S. attorney for the District of Maryland, called his decision to exploit elderly nursing-home residents and inexperienced interns for personal gain during a global pandemic unconscionable. Britton-Harr faces a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison on each count, and no sentencing date had been set when the conviction was announced.

The Medicare verdict follows Britton-Harr's June conviction on six counts of wire fraud involving AeroVanti customers, according to a separate Justice Department release. The Justice Department says he owned and controlled AeroVanti and its affiliated entities. Florida corporate records list AeroVanti Inc. as the manager of AeroVanti Hangar LLC, with a Sarasota address of 7990 15th St. E.

Through the private air club, he invited "Top Gun" members to pay $150,000 upfront toward aircraft purchases in exchange for discounted flight hours. Members collectively paid approximately $15 mill

Prepaid membership and aircraft-access models, in which customers advance large sums against future flight hours, depend heavily on the integrity and solvency of the operator's owner. Unlike a per-flight charter purchase, the customer here is an unsecured creditor from the day the deposit is paid. This case illustrates that exposure: the same individual is now convicted of defrauding the club's members and, separately, of an unrelated federal health care fraud scheme.

For the wider segment, the practical lesson concerns due diligence on counterparties rather than the aircraft themselves. Where deposits are large and the service is delivered later, the questions that matter are who controls the funds, whether the money is held apart from operating accounts, and what the operator's other business activities and legal exposure look like.

The next milestone the Justice Department's announcement points to is sentencing on the Medicare counts, for which no date had been set. How that sentence interacts with the earlier wire fraud conviction will determine the total penalty Britton-Harr faces.