LOS ANGELES, CA – Northrop Grumman Corp. paid $325 million today to settle a whistleblower lawsuit brought by Phillips & Cohen LLP, which is the largest defense contractor whistleblower case settlement and the second largest settlement ever paid involving defense contractor fraud.
The whistleblower lawsuit exposed TRW Inc.’s efforts to stop a scientist from revealing his research findings about faulty electronic components the company sold to the government for military and intelligence-gathering satellites. Northrop Grumman later acquired TRW.
Phillips & Cohen’s client, Robert Ferro, will be awarded $48.7 million for his work and the work of his attorneys on the case. The False Claims Act requires the government to reward whistleblowers 15 percent to 25 percent of the amount the government recovers as a result of a qui tam case.
The whistleblower lawsuit — joined by the government and made public today — alleged that TRW, which Northrop Grumman acquired in 2002, sold to the government components known as “heterojunction bipolar transistors,” or “HBTs,” that TRW knew were likely to fail in government satellites.
The qui tam lawsuit says a government satellite “experienced critical failures” while in orbit in 2001, but at that time the government didn’t know that TRW had long been aware that failures of its components were likely.
Research conducted in 1995 clearly demonstrated the parts would fail if placed in satellites, but TRW didn’t inform the government of this before or after the problem occurred. Several government programs delayed launch of their satellites to determine the cause of the problems with the satellite in space. Those programs eventually replaced the HBTs in their satellites.
Ferro, the whistleblower, is a scientific researcher who discovered in 1995 that the HBTs produced by TRW were likely to fail when operated under high electrical currents, such as when used in satellites. But TRW had insisted on a nondisclosure agreement before allowing Ferro to test its parts and refused to allow Ferro and his employer, Aerospace Corp., a private research company, to disclose the negative results to anyone.
The cover-up continued into 2002, when Ferro heard about the satellite’s problems. The Air Force asked Ferro’s employer, Aerospace, to provide an explanation of whether TRW should have known of the potential problem. Ferro attempted to include in that report the results of his 1995 research. But TRW sanitized the Aerospace report, making sure there was no mention of Ferro’s 1995 testing and editing out references to other warnings that TRW had received over the years.
TRW also withheld from the government information about a massive recall of cell phone equipment because they contained similarly defective TRW HBTs just a month before the government began to experience its own HBT failures. Instead, TRW said the government problems were the result of a new defect that had never been seen before.
When the government directed TRW to issue an industry-wide alert (known as a GIDEP alert) about the HBT problem, TRW initially resisted, then issued an alert that made no mention of the failures. The alert merely stated, falsely, that some customers had improperly been using commercial-grade parts rather than flight-qualified parts.
Ferro then went directly to the government with his information and later hired Phillips & Cohen, which filed a “qui tam” (whistleblower) lawsuit in federal district court in Los Angeles to make sure his disclosures were properly investigated. A company cannot shield itself from a whistleblower lawsuit brought under the False Claims Act by hiding behind nondisclosure agreements.
As part of today’s settlement, the U.S. has agreed to settle for $325 million an unrelated claim Northrop had made against the federal government.
Because of the classified nature of some of the evidence, the Justice Department constructed several high-tech, secure facilities, two on the East Coast and one on the West Coast, devoted solely to the case. Many of the issues could be discussed only in one of those facilities.
The Justice Department had many attorneys working long hours on the investigation, including some of the most senior members of the department.
Ferro’s qui tam lawsuit [United States ex rel. Ferro v. TRW Inc., case no. 02-9934-PA (C.D. Calif.)] was brought under the False Claims Act, which allows individuals to sue companies that defraud the government and to recover funds on the government’s behalf.
Phillips & Cohen LLP is the nation’s largest and most successful law firm representing whistleblowers in cases brought under the False Claims Act and other government reward programs, including the US Securities and Exchange Commission whistleblower program and the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission whistleblower program.
If you are considering stepping forward with information about fraud or other wrongdoing, please contact us for a confidential, free review of your matter.
ABOUT PHILLIPS & COHEN LLP
Phillips & Cohen is the most successful law firm representing whistleblowers, with recoveries from our cases totaling billions. We have been recognized for our work by numerous national awards. Our attorneys and cases have been in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and other news media. Three of our cases were featured in the CBS series, “Whistleblower.” Phillips & Cohen’s roster includes former federal prosecutors, the first head of the SEC Office of the Whistleblower, a former deputy administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the author of a leading treatise on the False Claims Act and attorneys with decades of experience representing whistleblowers.