Three directors resign from private equity-owned Sevita Health in response to FTC enforcement efforts

On September 15, 2025, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced that three directors from Sevita Health’s Board of Directors had resigned in response to an enforcement action on interlocking directorates.

An interlocking directorate is when a member of one company’s board of directors serves on another company’s board of directors, and is considered illegal under federal antitrust law if the companies are competitors.

The FTC announcement does not name the individuals who resigned, but states that “Sevita and Beacon Specialized Living Services, Inc. (Beacon) both provide services, including residential facilities, to individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Despite this, they had common representation on each firm’s board of directors.”

It also names private equity investment, explicitly, as a potential factor in interlocking directorates, stating that “We encourage all firms to review their board memberships to avoid any overlaps with competitors—including when new board members are added as a result of investments by private equity firms or other new shareholders.”

As of this writing, neither Sevita nor Beacon list current leadership or board members on their websites, and neither company has publicly addressed the enforcement action.

Sevita^[1] is a national provider of home and community-based specialty healthcare to adults and children with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD), individuals with complex care needs, people recovering from brain injury, and children in foster care. Private equity firms Vistria Group and Centerbridge acquired Sevita in March 2019.

Beacon Specialized Living provides various service lines to people with IDD, including day programs and residential programs, and was acquired by Vistria Group in March 2022.

Vistria Group owns a third IDD services company, Help at Home, alongside Centerbridge Partners.

In March 2025, PESP released a report on private equity’s investments in intellectual and developmental disability (IDD) services that pointed out that overlapping leadership at Help and Home and Sevita raised questions about potential anticompetitive behavior. The report also flagged that Vistria Group owns Beacon Specialized Living. According to the report:

“Sevita and Help at Home have substantial overlaps in their board and executive leadership, including representation by their private equity owners. For example, Help at Home’s CEO Chris Hocevar sits on Sevita’s board of directors. At least three Help at Home Board members also serve on the board of Sevita (Jeremy Gelber, David Schuppan, and Alan Wheatley). In addition, Help at Home board member Kristen Hughes is Managing Director at Centerbridge, and is also ‘involved in the firm’s investments in Sevita Health, Inc.’”^[2]

Jeremy Gelber is a senior managing director at Centerbridge, and David Schuppan is a senior partner at Vistria Group.

David Schuppan was one of multiple defendants in a lawsuit brought by Encompass Health and Enhabit (a spinoff of Encompass) over breach of fiduciary duty. A former Encompass employee, April Anthony, who was found by the Delaware Court of Chancery to have breached her fiduciary duty, had worked with private equity firms Vistria Group and Nautic Partners to recruit employees to the two firms’ home health company, VitalCaring, while she was still at Encompass. She ultimately became CEO of VitalCaring.

In addition to finding breaches of fiduciary duty by Anthony and other former Encompass Health officers, the Court found that “with full awareness that their actions were wrong,” Vistria and Nautic and two of their principals, David Schuppan and Christopher Corey, “drove the fiduciaries’ efforts to covertly siphon opportunities, information, resources, and employees from Encompass.”

In December 2024, the Court ruled that VitalCaring Group must pay 43 percent of its profits to Encompass, and that if VitalCaring Group is sold, Encompass will receive 43 percent of the profits. The Court also awarded mitigation damages in the amount of approximately $1.62 million”^[3] In February 2025, HospiceNews reported that a federal judge had denied VitalCaring’s request to reconsider this ruling.

Continued enforcement of the FTC’s rule on interlocking directorates will reduce the likelihood of anti-competitive business practices that may arise from conflicts of interest showing up in corporate boards. Healthcare companies’ and their investors’ anticompetitive behaviors can contribute to harmful impacts for patients and health workers, including depressed wages and higher healthcare costs for patients and payers.^[4] In May 2024, then Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter announced a new healthcare task force from the Department of Justice (DOJ) focused on Health Care Monopolies and Collusion (HCMC). However, the Trump administration appears to have pivoted from targeting anticompetitive business practices to targeting “anticompetitive regulations” as part of its larger deregulatory agenda.

In response to the DOJ’s invitation to submit public comments on its new Anticompetitive Regulations Task Force, PESP joined 16 other organizations in May 2025 to call on the DOJ for greater oversight of consolidation and private equity in healthcare, rather than less regulation in this area.

Resources

^[1] Sevita was previously known as the Mentor Network and Civitas Solutions. It also currently operates under the name NeuroRestorative.

^[2] See pg. 21 of O’Grady, Eileen. Private Equity in Intellectual and Developmental Disability Services. Private Equity Stakeholder Project, 2025; Note that Help at Home no longer has a webpage listing its Board of Directors. An archived version from March 2025 can be accessed here.

^[3] Martin, Audrie. “Judge Upholds Ruling in VitalCaring, Encompass Health Case.” Hospice News, February 19, 2025. https://hospicenews.com/2025/02/19/judge-upholds-ruling-in-vitalcaring-encompass-health-case/ and Maddox, Will. “Judge Awards Damages Against Former Encompass CEO and ACU Board President April Anthony, Others.” D Magazine, December 9, 2024. https://www.dmagazine.com/healthcare-business/2024/12/judge-awards-damages-against-former-encompass-ceo-and-acu-board-president-april-anthony-others/.

^[4] See Brown, Erin C. Fuse, Yashaswini Singh, Christopher M. Whaley, and Jared Perkins. “The Rise Of Health Care Consolidation And What To Do About It.” Health Affairs, ahead of print, September 9, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1377/forefront.20240906.397095 and Pg. 23 of Valdes Viera, Oscar, Robert Seifert, and Aditi Sen. Wall Street on Your Doorstep: Protecting Home Care from Private Equity Abuses. Americans for Financial Reform, 2025. https://ourfinancialsecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Wall-Street-on-Your-Doorstep.pdf