The former owner of an Ohio-based health care company will spend nearly four years in prison for defrauding a Pennsylvania bank out of more than $59 million.

Harold Sosna, 59, formerly of Cincinnati, was sentenced to a 42-month prison term Friday by U.S. District Judge Marilyn Horan after he pleaded guilty last year to defrauding S&T Bank, based in Indiana County and with two branches in Butler County, in a multimillion-dollar check-kiting scheme to benefit his former company, Premier Healthcare Management.

Sosna also will have to repay the $59.24 million he defrauded from S&T Bank. His 42-month term is shorter than the 63- to 78-month sentence the government sought.

According to federal prosecutors, Sosna, whose company owned and operated nine nursing homes in Ohio, moved millions of dollars in unfunded checks between several banks in early 2020 to help fund the company's payroll obligations and repay high-interest, alternative loans it had taken after exhausting traditional lending.

Sosna did so by a form of bank fraud known as “check kiting” — basically, taking advantage of the typically one-day “float” period after depositing a check, when the bank will show the balance of the check as available despite it not having cleared, and moving the fictitious money back and forth between banks — court filings show.

On May 15 and May 18, 2020, Sosna moved 203 checks, worth more than $118 million, between S&T Bank and First Financial Bank accounts, according to court documents. The government equated Sosna's check kiting to a non-consensual loan to Sosna.

“Sosna knew — but S&T Bank did not — that the checks being written on First Financial accounts ... were not adequately funded,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memorandum. “When the kite ended, S&T Bank had been manipulated by Sosna into extending him $59 million of its own money on false pretenses.”

In an August court filing, Sosna's attorney said he engaged in the scheme to pay back merchant cash advance companies — essentially, payday lenders for businesses that “buy” a certain amount of the business' future revenue in exchange for instant cash, often at effective interest rates of 300%. S&T Bank, in an Ohio lawsuit it filed in July, claimed Sosna borrowed more than $48 million from these cash advance companies between February 2019 and May 2020.

“The impossibility of keeping afloat once the money lenders were involved, with their usury and threatening tactics, caused a kind, honest, generous and trustworthy man ... to make very wrong choices and conduct himself in an egregious manner that left many victims,” Sosna's lawyer wrote.