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Menendez donor reveals lobbying effort — 4 years late
BY TARINI PARTI and KENNETH P. VOGEL / 3/27/13 / POLITICO

A company controlled by Floridian Dr Solomon Melgen the Democratic donor in the middle of the Robert Menendez controversy this week revealed that it spent as much as $60,000 on previously undisclosed lobbying.

Salomon Melgen, a wealthy South Florida ophthalmologist and investor, has been fighting the federal government’s 2008 finding that his eye care company — Vitreo-Retinal Consultants — overbilled Medicare by $8.9 million. And he’s gotten help in that effort from his close friend Menendez, a Democratic senator from New Jersey.

Melgen’s lawyers had claimed he never hired a lobbyist for himself or his business interests and there were no mandatory reports on record detailing lobbying by Vitreo-Retinal Consultants — until now.

Paperwork filed Monday indicates that Alan Reider, a partner at the powerful law and lobbying firm Arnold & Porter, started lobbying the Senate in June 2009 for “Vitreo-Retinal Consultants Eye Center” on “issues related to Medicare reimbursement.”

In 2009 and 2012, the West Palm Beach, Fla-based company spent between $50,000 and $59,998, according to Monday’s filings, which indicate that it stopped its lobbying at the end of both years.

The retroactive registration comes amid escalating federal investigations into Melgen’s dealings with the Department of Health and Human Services, as well his efforts to get the United States government to intervene on his behalf in a contract dispute with the Dominican government, and increasingly suspect prostitution allegations involving him and Menendez.

As Melgen’s legal worries have mounted, he’s retained a top white-collar criminal defense lawyer from Arnold & Porter, Kirk Ogrosky. Melgen has also hired a big-time New York crisis communications firm, Kekst and Co.

The failure to file reports as Vitreo-Retinal Consultants was doing its lobbying could have been an oversight, said Sarah Bryner, research director at the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that tracks money in politics. “If a group filed a 2009 registration in 2012, it is possible that the organization wasn’t aware of the disclosure requirements, but has recently been informed,” she said.

Neither Ogrosky, nor Melgen’s spokesman, Reider or Menendez’s office responded to questions Wednesday morning about the lobbying activity. Anyone who qualifies as a lobbyist is required to disclose their lobbying work — and roughly how much they’re being paid for it — within 45 days of making a “lobbying contact” with more than one federal official, according to the Lobbying Disclosure Act. Those who “knowingly” violate it are subject to a maximum fine of $200,000.

The retroactive 2009 registration date places Reider’s initial lobbying activity in the same year that Menendez complained to the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services that its $8.9 million ruling against Melgen was unfair, according to an account Menendez’s office provided to The Washington Post. It also said that Menendez last year met again with the agency to question its findings.

Over the years, Melgen, his companies and family contributed nearly $1 million to Menendez’s campaigns and committees that could help it. That includes $700,000 donated last year by Vitreo-Retinal Consultants to the since-renamed Majority PAC super PAC, which spent $582,500 supporting Menendez’s 2012 election bid.

Federal Election Commission records also show that Menendez’s campaign, which has benefited from fundraisers hosted by Melgen, in 2012 received $1,000 from Reider and $7,000 from Arnold & Porter’s PAC.

Menendez also has vacationed frequently with Melgen and his wife at their Dominican Republic mansion, while Melgen has regularly visited the senator, now the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, at his home in New Jersey.

Earlier this year, Menendez paid $58,500 to reimburse Melgen for the cost of two previously undisclosed trips on the donor’s plane to the Dominican Republic, which the Senate Ethics Committee is examining.