The city has slapped a Health + Hospitals executive with a fine for enlisting her husband’s company for consulting services, using her H+H credit card to dine at five-star restaurants during the pandemic and securing a spot on her alma mater’s advisory board.
According to disposition documents released Wednesday by the city Conflicts of Interest Board, Danielle DiBari, senior vice president for business operations and chief pharmacy officer for the public safety-net hospital system, used her position to award Cyient, a technology company where her husband was a vice president and global business head of sales and business development, nearly $100,000 in business. While DiBari, who made $495,000 in her role in 2021, according to government transparency website SeeThroughNY, said she was forthcoming about her husband’s employment at Cyient, the board found the move to be a violation of the city charter which states that public servants cannot use their position to obtain contracts or financial gains for themselves or any person or firm associated with them.
On June 11, 2020, H+H entered into a contract with Cyient for data consulting services to “combine several disparate data sources to generate a single version of truth.” H+H paid $68,000 to Cyient for services between August 2020 and August 2021.
Additionally, DiBari arranged for H+H/Bellevue to purchase three prototypes of “C-19 ventilators” at $10,000 each from Cyient in 2020 that were not approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use on patients. DiBari wrote in her disposition that H+H leadership had instructed her to procure any machines she could, even those that had not yet gotten approval. The ventilators she bought from Cyient were never used on patients, the documents said.
DiBari stated in the disposition that she nor her husband received any payments as a result of H+H’s contracts with or purchases from Cyient. Additionally, her husband asked his company to remove two bonuses from his prospective compensation for the second and third quarters of fiscal 2021 for obtaining business with H+H, according to the documents.
The board also found that DiBari violated city charter by using her H+H credit card, which she and other high-level H+H employees were issued in 2020 for emergencies, for non-city purposes. While most cards had a $7,500 limit, DiBari had a $100,000 limit as a high-ranking procurement officer.
According to her disposition, DiBari used her card to make a $2,500 payment to her alma mater, St. John’s University, the amount required for her to get a spot on the dean’s advisory board for the university’s college of pharmacy and health sciences. DiBari alleges that she received permission from H+H’s deputy director of fiscal affairs to make the donation on her health system card.
Additionally, DiBari purchased more than $7,000 worth of restaurant meals and alcohol on her H+H credit card, the documents show. She made 38 purchases at largely expensive restaurants between 2020 and 2021, when indoor dining was restricted in the city, and bought alcohol during at least seven meals.
Her expenses included 13 meals at Cut by Wolfgang Puck, located inside the Four Seasons near Tribeca, and seven meals at Quality Italian on 57th Street, the documents show.
DiBari said she dined with other Health + Hospitals employees, including the chief executives and chief operating officers of H+H facilities, and employees of other city health care provider organizations.
Such payments with her card violated the charter which states that public servants cannot use city resources for non-city purposes, the board found.
In addition to the $25,000 which she must pay to the board, DiBari has repaid a total of $8,129 to H+H for meals expensed on her agency credit card, according to the board.
Neither representatives from H+H nor DiBari were able to provide comment before publication. H+H is the city’s safety-net public hospital system which operates 11 hospitals, 30 Gotham Health community health centers and five long-term care centers around the city.
Jacqueline Neber , 2024-03-28 10:33:04
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