On March 4, 2026, a federal grand jury in the Central District of California indicted David Ferrera and Marc Tilman—two former owners of a California-based medical device company that sold “coils” used to treat brain aneurysms and other vascular conditions—for their alleged roles in an international money laundering and bribery scheme involving a French government official. Ferrera, a U.S. citizen and California resident, and Tilman, a citizen and resident of Belgium, are accused of conspiring with others to pay bribes and paying bribes to an employee of the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Reims (“CHU Reims”), a French state-owned and state-controlled public university hospital.
The conspiracy allegedly began in 2017 and continued until around September 2023. The Department of Justice alleges that the bribe payments were made by a Belgium-based consulting company operated by Tilman in an effort to cause CHU Reims to purchase medical devices from companies that the defendants owned or controlled. According to the indictment, the bribe payments, which were made among bank accounts in Belgium, France and the United States, were disguised as “bonus” payments using sham consulting agreements and fake invoices. The defendants and their co-conspirators allegedly attempted to conceal the scheme by using personal email accounts and encrypted messaging applications to communicate about the scheme, as well as using coded language in those messages to refer to the bribe payments and payment amounts. Although not a U.S. citizen, Tilman was indicted as an agent of the medical device company, as it was a U.S. company.
The full set of charges against the defendants are one count of conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, two counts of violations of the FCPA’s anti-bribery provisions, one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, and two counts of money laundering.