An Indian-American couple has been convicted on charges of H-1B visa fraud and will face up to 30 years imprisonment, the Department of Justice has said. An Indian-American businessman from Virginia Raju Kosuri, 44, who used shell companies to fraudulently apply for nearly a thousand H-1B visa programme, will spend 28 months in federal prison and then is likely to be deported to India, according to a report on The Washington Post.
His wife Smriti Jharia, 46, of Ashburn, is also being sent back and will be accompanied by the couple’s US-born son, the report said. U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema said in court last Friday that problems with the prosecution of the case led to a more lenient sentence adding that the H-1B visa programme “has the potential to yield great financial rewards. The temptation is there.”
Smriti Jharia is one of the immigrants Kosuri had illegally sponsored. She pleaded guilty to falsely obtaining naturalization and agreed on Friday to move back to India immediately and give up her U.S. citizenship. She said their son, a native U.S. citizen who has never lived in India, will go with her. Charges against three other defendants allegedly involved in the scheme were dismissed prosecutors had failed to turn over relevant evidence, according to court records.
A sixth defendant was allowed to withdraw her guilty plea; she went to trial this month, and a verdict has not been reached. Starting in 2000, Kosuri launched over a dozen businesses that claimed to provide information technology services out of Danville, Va. In fact, he admitted, they existed merely as vehicles to get visas for Indian nationals who would actually work elsewhere making $20m in the process.
Kosuri, who emigrated from India in 1999 and was a lawful permanent resident, was paid millions by the companies where those visa recipients worked. He also obtained millions in bank financing by misrepresenting his business, as well as a $5,00,000 grant from the Virginia Tobacco Commission. He and his wife tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to win federal contracts through the Small Business Administration for one of the companies. Seventy-one percent of H-1B visa recipients came from India in 2015, as per a 2016 DHS report. In April, however, Trump ordered a review of the H-1B programme.
