Sarasota jet company founder convicted in $18.7M Medicare fraud

The founder of a Sarasota jet company convicted earlier this year of defrauding investors and customers of $15 million was found guilty this week in a separate case outside of Florida involving Medicare fraud. Patrick Britton-Harr, 42, of Annapolis, Maryland, was convicted by a federal jury on five counts of health care fraud and one count of transactional money laundering after prosecutors say he billed Medicare for $18.7 million worth of testing that was never performed during the pandemic.

The two convictions come years after high-flying Britton-Harr was considered an up-and-coming entrepreneur. In 2021, he founded the Sarasota and Annapolis company AeroVanti, which featured private jet memberships. It generated $20 million in revenue in its first year of operation, Britton-Harr told the Business Observer in 2022, when he was named a 40 Under 40 award winner. By 2023, customers began to file lawsuits alleging AeroVanti sold memberships for planes that had been repossessed. In June 2026, Britton-Harr was convicted of six counts of wire fraud related to AeroVanti after a jury found that members paid for planes with money that Britton-Harr went on to use for his own personal benefit.

Through another company he owned — Provista Health — officials say that Britton-Harr offered COVID-19 tests to nursing homes in 2020. After collecting specimens, prosecutors say, he billed Medicare $18.7 million for separate, high-priced respiratory pathogen panel (RPP) tests that were supposedly conducted in a laboratory he owned in Arizona over the course of six months; Medicare paid more than $7.2 million for the RPP testing. However, the lab was closed, the tests were not conducted, and in some cases, prosecutors say, Britton-Harr billed Medicare for testing on nursing home residents who were already deceased. In addition, the treating physicians testified they never ordered the tests for their nursing home patients, according to prosecutors.

Britton-Harr used the proceeds from his fraud scheme to fund a “lavish lifestyle, purchasing, among other things, a $112,500 Porsche 911, and making $25,000 monthly mortgage payments on his Annapolis waterfront mansion,” prosecutors say in a statement.

Courtesy image

Courtesy image

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector General and the FBI collaborated on the investigation.

“Patrick Britton-Harr will now face the consequences of his greed and brazen crimes,” Special Agent Jimmy Paul of the FBI’s Baltimore field office says in a statement. “The FBI and our law enforcement partners will not rest until fraudsters like Mr. Britton-Harr are brought to justice.”

Britton-Harr faces up to 60 years in federal prison for the Medicare fraud case and 120 years in federal prison in the wire fraud case connected to AeroVanti. He has requested a new trial in the AeroVanti wire fraud case after alleging misconduct between the deputy courtroom clerk and jurors. Both cases were tried in Maryland.

Britton-Harr's attorney, Gerald Ruter, did not respond to an email or voicemail Thursday seeking comment on the Medicare fraud case.

Sentencing in the Medicare fraud case is set for 10 a.m. Dec. 21, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Maryland says in an email to the Business Observer.