Pair Of Chicago-Area Hospitals Face Eviction Over $25M In Unpaid Rent
West Suburban Medical Center and Weiss Memorial Hospital are facing eviction after their owner, Resilience Healthcare, racked up $25M in combined back rent, according to notices posted to both properties' doors.
An eviction notice posted at the West Suburban Medical Center’s River Forest campus last week gave the hospital five days to repay the rent, The Chicago Sun-Times reported. That expired Tuesday.
West Suburban's main Oak Park campus and its River Forest location shuttered abruptly in late March because the hospital wasn't able to pay employees due to complications with its records system. Weiss Memorial Hospital went dark last summer after Medicare and Medicaid funding dried up.
Resilience Healthcare is in the middle of a legal dispute between its majority and minority owners. Rathnaker Reddy Patlola, the company's minority owner, owns the buildings under his Ramco Healthcare Holdings and is pushing for eviction and demanding back rent from Manoj Prasad, Resilience’s CEO and majority owner.
Neither Patlola nor Prasad could immediately be reached for comment.
Back rent for all of Resilience Healthcare’s properties totals $24.5M, according to the eviction notice. The notices were dated April 9 and gave five days for repayment.
Prasad filed a lawsuit Tuesday in response to the notice, saying in the complaint that his lease with Patlola restricts Patlola from evicting the hospitals.
“We said from the beginning that this eviction notice was without merit,” Prasad told the Sun-Times in a statement. “Today’s filing shows that Mr. Patlola signed a lease that explicitly prevents him from doing what he is now attempting to do.”
The lease, a copy of which was included in the complaint, says the landlord doesn't have the right to unilaterally terminate the lease, including in the case of default. The contract requires the landlord to give 90 days’ notice prior to eviction and attempt a good faith negotiation on rent, both of which Prasad alleges Patlola didn’t do.
Tensions between the two allegedly escalated, and Prasad's lawsuit says Patlola threatened in February to disparage Prasad to the media and “make everyone’s life a living hell” until he got “half a million [dollars] in rent every month and property taxes immediately.”
West Suburban's Oak Park campus, which closed on March 25, began restarting its hospital-based clinics and testing services on Wednesday, one day after Prasad filed his lawsuit. Prasad told the Sun-Times the hospital will resume operations at its primary care clinics first, then open specialist clinics.
General surgery services are expected to restart next week, but the emergency room and inpatient services remain shuttered.
The hospitals were previously owned by Pipeline Health System, which went bankrupt in 2022.
