Engineering Firm Under Investigation

Houston: A long-time city and county vendor who has donated heavily to local politicians and raked in at least $55 million from government contracts has been charged in connection with an alleged multimillion-dollar bribery scheme in which he is accused of defrauding another company to win contracts.

Sudhakar Kalaga, a 56-year-old Sugar Land business owner and the founder of engineering firm KIT Professionals, was charged last month with conspiracy to commit mail fraud and accused of giving the manager of another company millions of dollars in kickbacks in exchange for lucrative contracts.

arbitrary category, Foundation attorneys contended.

“Seattle has taken a dangerous misstep here, institutionalizing bias against all residents of Indian and South Asian origin, all in the name of preventing bias,” said HAF Managing Director Samir Kalra. “When Seattle should be protecting the civil rights of all its residents, it is actually violating them by running roughshod over the most basic and fundamental rights in US law, all people being treated equally.”

Though caste discrimination has been presented by Councilmember Sawant and her supporters as being rampant in the US, the only authoritative survey on discrimination against the Indian and South Asian community here, done by the Carnegie Endowment, has found that incidents of caste discrimination are rare.

Furthermore this survey specifically rebuked the findings and methodology of a survey by Equality Labs upon which Councilmember Sawant based her resolution.

The charging document also accuses Kalaga of submitting fake bids from non-existent construction companies to make his firm’s bids appear lower. The alleged scheme continued for a decade from 2010 to 2019, according to investigators.

While the conspiracy charge only concerns Kalaga’s dealings in the private sector, records show his firm has carried out a high volume of public work for both the city of Houston and Harris County.

From 2008 to 2022, the firm was awarded $109 million in city work, most as an engineering subcontractor but also as a prime contractor on several occasions, and still is engaged on dozens of active contracts.

To date, KIT Professionals has received at least $50 million in payments from the city under 152 contracts, eight of them as the prime contractor and the rest as a subcontractor.

Kalaga stepped down from his role as the president of KIT Professionals after the criminal charge was filed on January 13 to protect the firm and its employees, according to his attorney, Rusty

Hardin. His wife still is listed on the company’s website as its vice president.

Hardin said Kalaga has taken responsibility for the wrongdoing since the initial civil lawsuit in 2019, and highlighted that nothing regarding KIT Professionals’ government contracts have been deemed improper.

“He has always accepted full responsibility for what’s happened, immediately separated himself from the company when these charges were filed, and there is no suggestion that any of the city contracts or any government contracts were an issue at all,” Hardin said. Kalaga made his initial appearance in federal court on January 25. If convicted, he could face up to five years in federal prison and a maximum $250,000 fine, according to the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Texas. He remains free on $50,000 bail.

Kalaga’s work for the city continued even after accusations of fraud and bribery first surfaced in a 2019 civil lawsuit that the victim company, Toshiba International, filed against him, alleging he used fake bids to trick the manufacturing giant into awarding him over $100 million in construction contracts. -- Houston Chronicle.