Indians held in U.S.;

immigration racket busted

 Washington: With the arrest of seven Indians, U.S. authorities have claimed to have busted an immigration racket run by an information technology company owner who charged tens of thousands of dollars from expatriates by fraudulently sponsoring their H-1B work visas.

Nilesh Dasondi, 41, was arrested last week on multiple counts of visa fraud involving Cygate Software and Consulting Inc. which run offices in India and Canada.

A naturalised U.S. citizen, Dasondi, also a member of the Edison township board in New Jersey, was released after posting a $8,00,000 bail but he must remain under home confinement with electronic monitoring.

According to court papers cited in Newsday daily, Dasondi is accused of filing federal work visa and immigration documents for six people who did not work for his company between 2003 and 2007, the authorities said. All the six have been arrested.

In exchange, they made payments of more than $8,50,000. The money was used to support phoney payroll disbursements back to the people, fund tax payments and, in some cases, pay for health insurance, authorities said.

Dasondi, however, kept for himself the remainder of the cash after the so-called “running the payroll” scheme.

Three bank accounts in the name of Cygate were seized. A fourth account in the name of another company Dasondi controlled was also frozen.

Among those arrested were Kishor Parikh (42), Devang Patel (31) and Chetan Trivedi (40). — PTI