ABINGDON, Va. (CBS19 NEWS) -- A Las Vegas man has been sentenced in a Medicare kickback scheme that had ties to clinics in Virginia.

According to a release, 49-year-old Rakesh Reddy Kothuru was the majority owner of Laboratory Services of America, LLC, or LSA, which paid another lab owner to direct urine samples to his lab for testing and billed federal health programs for that testing.

He pleaded guilty in January to one count of knowingly and willfully making false representations of material facts for payments under federal health care programs.

This plea means Kothuru is barred from participating in federal health care benefit programs in the future.

He was also required to pay $500,000 in restitution and forfeitures before being sentenced last week.

Court documents show that a lab called American Toxicology Labs, or ATL, would screen urine samples and then send those same samples to other labs for “confirmation” testing.

ATL was owned by Michael Norman Dube, who also operated a chain of clinics in Virginia and Tennessee that claimed they treated opioid addiction with buprenorphine.

The providers at the clinics frequently ordered urine screens for patients to assess their drug use and to get medically-necessary information needed for treatment.

In January 2015, Dube and Kothuru began an arrangement that had Dube refer all of ATL’s tested urine samples to LSA for confirmation testing.

As a result, Dube would get cash kickback payments in his personal checking account.

Then between March 2015 and September 2016, Kothuru’s lab got more than $750,000 from Medicare, Virginia Medicaid, Kentucky Medicaid and TennCare as compensation for conducting the confirmation testing on samples that were directly related to services illegally billed and collected through the agreement between Kothuru and Dube.

Dube, who pleaded to two counts of health care fraud in March 2021 and was sentenced to three years in federal prison, was actually already barred from participating in any federal health care program.

This was associated with a previous guilty plea to intentionally omitting information from reports as required under the Controlled Substances Act in 2011.

As part of his plea deal for this kickback scheme, Dube was also ordered to pay more than $9 million in fines, forfeitures and restitution costs.

Kothuru was sentenced to four months of house arrest and ordered to pay a total of $510,000 in forfeiture, restitution and fines.