In a major setback to Chief Minister Revanth Reddy, who is making intense efforts to expose BRS top leaders corrupt and irregular practices during their regime, Congress leader Srinivasa Reddy was found to have orchestrated a major US H1B visa scam.
Adilabad constituency Congress in-charge and its candidate from Adilabad in the last Assembly elections, Kandi Srinivasa Reddy found himself embroiled in the scam. His companies are fond of collaborating to exploit the lottery and secure over 300 H-1B visas since 2020.
Exposing his mischievous transactions, Business news major Bloomberg has published an investigative report on how Srinivasa Reddy and his firms in the US were involved in lotteries to win H1B visas for employees to work in the US, and how his firms were renting workers to US firms through a scheme flagged by the US government.
According to a Bloomberg report, Srinivasa Reddy has set up a foundation to help farmers near his hometown back in India and started his own TV and online news operation there. He jumped into local politics, becoming an aide to Telangana chief minister Revanth Reddy.
Last year, he ran for a legislative seat, presenting himself to voters as a man of humble roots who’d become a successful entrepreneur in the States. But, he was defeated in the polls.
According to the Bloomberg investigation, Srinivasa Reddy had created his own small company “with a grand ambition to become the Amazon of Staffing.” It further added, in 2013, he started his own outfit called Cloud Big Data Technologies LLC. Much of his firm’s strategy involved working the US immigration system.
Cloud Big Data would look for tech workers who needed an H-1B to remain in or move to the US, offering recruiters up to $8,000 a head, according to online ads. After winning an H-1B, Reddy’s company would rent the workers on contract to corporations such as Meta Platforms Inc. and HSBC Holdings Plc., visa applications show.
The company said in its online advertisements that it collected 20% or 30% of the worker’s pay, an amount that could reach $15,000 or more each year for a typical worker.
A report published by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) last year describes a scheme, involving a group of 13 related companies that worked in concert to exploit the law. The report doesn’t name the companies, but by matching the report’s details to the visa data, Bloomberg News was able to link them all to Srinivasa Reddy.
Cloud Big Data, for instance, was identified in the report as “Company B.” Neither USCIS nor Reddy’s representatives would confirm or deny the connections, says Bloomberg.