I’ve previously blogged about the dubious circumstances in which Steve Jobs, a longtime resident of California, managed to secure a liver transplant in Tennessee. Now, a new report in the NY Post suggests that there may be some hanky-panky between the Doctor who performed the surgery and Jobs.

Fresh questions about Steve Jobs’ liver transplant have been raised after it emerged that the doctor who performed the surgery spent two years in the Memphis, Tenn., house Jobs bought for his recovery.

Dr. James Eason, who performed the March 2009 liver transplant, moved into the palatial house Jobs bought for his recovery just a few months after the operation, according to a report.

It isn’t the first time questions have been raised over whether Jobs, a California resident, received an unfair advantage in landing the Memphis transplant.

Eason lived in the house in midtown Memphis for two years before buying it outright in May 2011, a few months before Jobs died.

…

During the two years he lived there, bills from Memphis Light, Gas and Water were paid for by Jobs’ San Francisco lawyer, George Riley, according to the report in The Commercial Appeal, Memphis’s largest daily paper.

Between May 2010 and 2011, Riley used his credit card to cover $8,770 in utility bills for the home.

Riley also wrote personal checks to the tune of $23,585 to cover the property taxes between 2009 and May 2011, when Eason bought the house outright.

Is there a potential conflict of interest, especially in light of the difficult decisions about providing organs to people on the waiting lists?

“It strikes me as a potential conflict of interest,” said Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist for New York University.

Shortly after it emerged that Jobs had the surgery in 2009, Eason issued a statement saying that Jobs received the transplant “because he was … the sickest patient on the waiting list at the time a donor organ became available,” based on a scoring system known as the Model for End-Stage Liver Disease, or MELD.