From the Beacon News:
Old Aurora hospital's new owner has powerful ties
November 8, 2007
BY CHRIS FUSCO AND DAVE MCKINNEY Chicago Sun-Times
It was a weekend retreat. Gov. Rod Blagojevich had gotten together with his top
fundraisers at a Lake Geneva resort in the fall of 2003.
The governor gave a speech. There was a cocktail party and a boat cruise. Then,
at 2 in the morning, a fight broke out.
The public never heard about it. But documents obtained by the Sun-Times show
one Blagojevich campaign backer went to a hospital, and another ended up the subject
of a monthlong police investigation.
Ultimately, it all was kept quiet when the injured man decided not to press charges
-- after telling investigators a high-ranking aide to the governor urged him to
drop the case.
The two main players in this drama have gone on to donate hundreds of thousands
of dollars to Blagojevich. And both have been involved in new scuffles -- of a
nonviolent nature.
According to police reports, the Lake Geneva incident happened at 2 a.m. on Oct.
19, 2003, at the Grand Geneva Resort & Spa.
The key participants: Raghuveer Nayak, a hospital and surgery-center owner from
Oak Brook who recently revealed he purchased the old Copley hospital in Aurora
in February and contributed $10,000 to Mayor Tom Weisner's 2005 election campaign;
and Harish M. Bhatt of Lockport, who owns a pharmacy that has done millions of
dollars in state Medicaid business.
Bhatt told police he answered a knock at his hotel-room door and saw Nayak and
Nayak's business partner, Dr. Navin V. Barot. Apparently, the men had exchanged
words earlier. A police report quotes Nayak as telling Bhatt: "What were
you telling my friend?"
Then, Barot "grabbed (Bhatt) and held onto him" while Nayak "was
throwing punches with his left arm and fist," Bhatt told the Walworth County,
Wis., sheriff's police. Bhatt said he "bled profusely."
Nayak later told an investigator he acted in "self defense" after an
"intoxicated" Bhatt went after him, "pushed him twice" and
kicked him hard in the groin.
Bhatt went to the emergency room at Memorial Hospital in Burlington, Wis., with
what turned out to be a broken nose.
At first, Bhatt wanted charges filed. About a month later, he changed his mind,
telling investigators he'd been contacted by Rajinder Bedi, a top administrator
with the state Commerce Department who has helped Blagojevich raise campaign cash
in the Indian-American community.
Bhatt told investigators that Bedi, who took him to the hospital, kept calling
in the weeks after, "telling him not to press charges."
Asked this week about the incident, a spokesman for Bhatt, 57, said he would not
comment.
In an interview, Nayak, 52, described the altercation as a "freak accident.
... We were playing around, joking around. He was running out, and he just slipped
and fell."
Barot said he recalled little about what happened, other than that he "was
trying to prevent any kind of quarrel."
Bedi couldn't be reached.
Dismissing any notion that the governor asked Bedi to intervene, Doug Scofield,
a Blagojevich campaign spokesman, said, "That is not a request that the governor
or anyone close to him would ever make."
Nayak has become a contentious figure in Aurora over his plans for the old Copley
redevelopment project. He also is seeking to be a delegate for Democratic presidential
candidate Hillary Clinton and is listed as a campaign contributor to dozens of
politicians, mostly Democrats.
In 2005, the Illinois State Police investigated whether Bhatt's ties to the Blagojevich
administration had influenced a regulatory investigation into his pharmacy business.
State Police dropped the case without filing charges.