Former state deputy budget director Konstantinos Diamantis and former state Democratic lawmaker Christopher Ziogas were indicted Friday on federal corruption charges for allegedly pressuring state employees to cancel a 2020 audit that was examining a Bristol eye doctor’s Medicaid billing practices.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Jonathan Francis unveiled extortion, bribery and conspiracy charges, among others, against Ziogas and Diamantis during two separate arraignment hearings before U.S. District Court Magistrate S. Dave Vatti in federal court in Bridgeport.
The indictment comes just weeks after Helen Zervas, the Bristol eye doctor and Ziogas’ fiancée, pleaded guilty in federal court to defrauding Medicare and Medicaid and conspiring with two state officials to cancel the audit.
Diamantis and Ziogas were also charged with making false statements to federal investigators about the alleged scheme. Prosecutors also hit Diamantis with a separate charge of filing a false tax return and similarly charged Ziogas with bank fraud.
Ziogas, 73, and Diamantis, 68, both pleaded not guilty to the charges and were released on $500,000 bail each.
The indictment also identifies, but does not name, three state officials whom Diamantis allegedly pressured into cancelling the audit. One of them is identified as the commissioner of the Department of Social Services, who at the time was Deidre Gifford, now the commissioner of the Office of Health Strategy.
Gov. Ned Lamont’s spokesperson Julia Bergman declined to comment. Gifford, who in addition to heading up DSS oversaw the state’s response to the COVID pandemic as the head of the Department of Public Health, also declined to comment on the ongoing investigation.
As part of the terms of their release, both Diamantis and Ziogas agreed not to speak with a list of witnesses about the investigation and prosecution. For Ziogas, that means that he is barred from communicating about the investigation with Zervas. Diamantis is similarly barred from talking about the case with another unnamed witness with whom he is in a domestic relationship.
Ziogas and his attorney Patrick Tomasiewicz declined to comment as they left federal court Friday afternoon.
Meanwhile, Diamantis’ attorney, Norm Pattis, called the newly unsealed charges “ridiculous,” and he vowed to take the case to trial.
This is the second time in less than a year that Diamantis has been accused of using his public office to enrich himself.
Diamantis, who ran Connecticut’s school construction office for more than six years, was charged in May 2024 with extorting several construction contractors and accepting thousands of dollars in bribes from those companies.
There had been signs that Diamantis and Ziogas could face federal charges before this week.
Grand jury subpoenas obtained by The Connecticut Mirror last year showed federal prosecutors were investigating Diamantis’ relationship with Zervas, the owner of Family Eye Care, and examining why the state scrubbed a scheduled audit of her medical practice.
As part of Zervas’ Feb. 11 guilty plea, she admitted that she conspired with a former state lawmaker and former high-ranking Connecticut employee to pressure officials at the state’s Medicaid agency to cancel an audit that was examining Medicaid overpayments at her optometry practice.
At that time, federal prosecutors would not identify those public officials. But the newly unsealed indictments allege that Zervas conspired with Ziogas and Diamantis.
According to the indictment, Zervas paid Diamantis a total of $95,000 in three separate payments in early 2020 so that he would apply pressure on state employees who were auditing her office.
Prosecutors allege that Ziogas served as the go-between for that transaction. Ziogas made three different payments to Diamantis, according to the indictments, and Zervas reimbursed Ziogas for those payments with checks from her business.
When federal investigators asked Ziogas in 2022 about the payments to Diamantis, he claimed “they may have been loans,” according to the indictment.
Ziogas made the initial payment of $20,000 to Diamantis on March 4, 2020, the same day that Zervas’ attorney began negotiating a resolution to the audit. Ziogas made a second payment of $10,000 about a week later.
Text messages between Zervas and Diamantis show that they negotiated what his final payment was going to be for about two months after the first two payments were made.
Diamantis wrote to Zervas, “Chris asked me what would make me happy for a number” before adding, “you put a value on what it was worth to you to save it all.” He went on to note that she avoided criminal fraud charges.
In May, Diamantis received a final payment from Zervas of $65,000, the documents state.
Diamantis, Ziogas and Zervas all have significant ties to the city of Bristol.
Zervas has operated her optometry practice in the city for decades. Ziogas represented Bristol in the General Assembly from 2017 to 2022. And Diamantis served in the same capacity from the 1990s to the early 2000s, prior to being hired as a state employee.
At the time the alleged extortion scheme took place, Diamantis was Connecticut’s deputy budget director, the second-highest position within the state Office of Policy and Management.
Documents obtained by the CT Mirror last year show that Diamantis helped to deliver a nearly $600,000 check to the Department of Social Services in May 2020 in order to repay the state’s Medicaid program for procedures Zervas was compensated for but never actually performed.
The records also indicate that, shortly after that check was delivered to the DSS office in Hartford, state officials took the uncharacteristic step of cancelling the audit for Zervas’ practice.
Such audits can often take months or years to complete and, in some instances, can open medical providers up to criminal charges if officials determine someone intentionally defrauded the Medicaid program.
Diamantis and Ziogas told the CT Mirror last year that there was nothing illegal about the $599,000 check they hand-delivered to state officials to cover the Medicaid overpayments to Zervas’ office. And they said their involvement had nothing to do with the Medicaid audit being cancelled.
But prosecutors alleged Friday that Diamantis pressured three different public officials to get the Medicaid audit canceled.
While the indictment does not name those public officials, it identifies them as a senior official at the Office of Policy and Management who worked closely with Diamantis; the commissioner of the Department of Social Services; and another official at DSS who supervised the Office of Quality Assurance, which conducted Medicaid audits.
Pattis, Diamantis’ attorney, was adamant Friday that his client would fight the mountain of charges now filed against him. And he questioned why federal prosecutors were spending so much time and money pursuing Diamantis.
The amount of effort that federal prosecutors have devoted to investigating and prosecuting Diamantis, Pattis argued, was a waste of government resources.
Pattis said Diamantis is not a criminal, and he said prosecutors should instead be investigating Gov. Ned Lamont and his wife, who is the partner at a hedge fund.
It was not the first time that Pattis has argued that federal authorities should investigate Connecticut’s two-term Democratic governor. He made the same recommendation directly to U.S. Department of Justice officials in Washington D.C earlier this month.
Pattis sent a letter to Emil Bove III, one of the top U.S. Department of Justice officials in President Donald Trump’s administration, on Feb. 14.
In that letter, Pattis asked Bove to intervene in Diamantis’ and Zervas’ federal cases and alleged that Diamantis was being investigated only to distract people from Lamont.
Pattis alleged Diamantis’ prosecution was meant to divert attention away from SEMA4, a company that received investments from Annie Lamont’s firm and was awarded state contracts for COVID-19 testing in Connecticut.
Pattis presented no evidence of wrongdoing on the part of the governor or his wife. The Office of State Ethics determined in 2019 that the Lamonts had taken adequate steps to be in compliance with the Code of Ethics for Public Officials.
Pattis’ letter to federal officials was a long-shot attempt to have the case against Diamantis reviewed or ended.
The letter was sent shortly after Bove ordered prosecutors to drop federal corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams in return for Adams assisting Trump’s administration in its immigration enforcement efforts.
Pattis told Bove that federal prosecutors in Connecticut would “spare no effort” to convict Diamantis. And Pattis said one federal prosecutor recently suggested they would pull Diamantis’ family members and loved ones into the ongoing investigation unless he pleads guilty.