The former business partners who’d been running Oak Park’s West Suburban Medical Center together until its abrupt closure in March faced off in court on Friday.
Emergency legal action filed last month by both co-owners of Resilience Healthcare came to a head May 8 with an eight-and-a-half hour hearing inside Cook County Judge Patrick Stanton’s courtroom on the 25th floor of the Daley Center. Resilience Healthcare CEO Manoj Parasd and Resilience co-owner and hospital landlord Rathnaker Reddy Patlola both spent hours on the witness stand, offering radically different versions of the business strategies that governed West Suburban and Chicago’s Weiss Memorial Hospital before both hospitals’ eventual closures.
Patlola filed a lawsuit on April 22 in Cook County court against Resilience Healthcare, seeking $24 million in unpaid rent and fees and alleged that prolonged mismanagement of the hospital drove West Sub and Weiss to collapse. That action came after Prasad sued Patlola alleging that he was trying to illegally evict the hospitals from their real estate.
Patlola owns the properties for West Suburban Medical Center in Oak Park and River Forest, Weiss Memorial Hospital in Chicago and other associated medical buildings through an entity called Ramco Holdings. He also owns a 40% stake in Resilience.
His lawsuit is seeking to have management of the hospitals transferred to a receiver so a new operator can reopen the hospital.
“Right now, there is no hope for the hospitals to reopen,” Patlola said.
Prasad maintained throughout the hearing that he and Patlola had struck a deal that put rent for the hospital at just $1 a year until a profit was turned.
“We trusted each other,” Prasad said. “One thing I’d made very clear was that these hospitals could not pay any kind of rent.”
Patlola said the lease Prasad’s attorneys presented to support that narrative was fabricated.
“Nobody would’ve signed a lease for $1 for more than $90 million in property, absolutely not,” Patlola said.
Closing arguments in the case are set for Monday afternoon.
Patlola filed the suit for seven counts of breach of contract, seeking to recover over $24 million in unpaid rent and fees for Resilience-owned buildings. The landlord’s lawsuit also alleged that Prasad had “misappropriated” a $10 million state loan meant to cover hospital operating expenses, transferring the money to a Fifth Third Bank account Patlola said he wasn’t allowed access to.
According to Ramco’s suit, the same day that Resilience received a $10 million loan for Weiss Memorial Hospital on May 2, 2025, the money was moved from Weiss’ lockbox account to the hospital’s operating account, then transferred to an entity called Westlaw Management Group. Ramco claims the state money was not used for hospital operations, which led to Weiss closing weeks later after its Medicare agreement was terminated by federal officials.
The court heard testimony from former Resilience Healthcare CFO and Weiss Memorial CEO Irene Dumanis, who testified that Prasad would regularly have her transfer $25,000 to $30,000 to that account in part to “supplement his payroll” with funds that wouldn’t be noticed during his ongoing divorce proceedings.
Prasad denied that accusation and testified that Patlola always had access to the Fifth Third account.
Patlola said that when he tried to get information about the account’s balance and history at the bank’s Oak Park branch, he was denied. He said at least $35 million had been transferred to that account over the years.
Ramco’s suit also argues that Prasad’s alleged misappropriation of state funds led to major facilities issues at the hospitals, including failing HVAC systems and non-operative X-ray machines creating unsafe conditions for patients. Prasad said it was Ramco’s duty as landlord to pay to support the facility maintenance, which he said they failed to do.
The court also heard testimony from Andrea Saviozzi, the former Executive Director of Nursing at West Sub. She spoke to the deteriorating conditions at the Oak Park safety-net hospital that played out after Resilience acquired the hospital from Pipeline Health.
“Our rating went from a ‘B” rating to an ‘F’ rating,” said Saviozzi. “We didn’t have hot water, our patients were eating out of Styrofoam containers because we couldn’t wash dishes.”
The courtroom was packed the entire session with laid off West Sub hospital employees, who’d coordinated via a group that began meeting weekly after the hospital closed. Some of those employees laughed audibly during Prasad’s testimony, enough so that Judge Stanton called for order multiple times.
One of those instances came when he said that Resilience had done a better job of paying vendors than their predecessors at Pipeline. During the hearing, Patlola testified that the hospitals’ debts to vendors had grown to over $60 million, on top of unpaid taxes and a pending lawsuit with Pipeline.
Hospital leadership announced the closure of West Sub in March citing a prolonged failure in the hospital’s electronic medical record billing system that resulted in as much as 90% of its work going unbilled. In the months leading up to the closure, Wednesday Journal reported on a variety of financial issues at West Sub and at Resilience Healthcare, including unpaid vendors, the loss of the hospital’s once revered doctor residency program and the millions owed in state and local taxes.
Some clinic level patient care services have resumed at West Sub’s Oak Park campus, according to Prasad.