Suburban father, son charged with education fraud

[Disir]

A father and son who run education companies based in suburban Niles defrauded more than $33 million in federal grants from school districts across the country by misrepresenting the tutoring services they purportedly provided to low-income students, federal prosecutors said Monday.

Prosecutors alleged that the two also paid bribes to school officials in Texas and New Mexico in exchange for recruiting students and steering federal and state funds from school districts. The bribes included Caribbean cruise vacations, meals and “services at a gentlemen’s club,” according to an indictment returned last week.

Jowhar Soultanali, director of operations for Brilliance Academy Inc., and his son, Kabir Kassam, who is president, pocketed $8 million to $13.6 million for themselves and their families from the more than $33 million they fraudulently obtained from about 200 school districts around the country, including in Illinois, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Chicago.

Soultanali, 58, of Morton Grove, and Kassam, 34, of Wheeling, were each charged with mail fraud and federal program bribery.

Also indicted on one count each of federal program bribery were Arturo Martinez, 52, an educational administrator with the New Mexico Public Education Department; Cedric Petersen, 61, an assistant principal at Fox Tech High School in San Antonio; Armando Rodriguez, 54, a tutoring coordinator at Miller High School in Corpus Christi, Texas; and Brian Harris, 33, an official at Sam Houston High School in San Antonio, prosecutors said.

Soultanali, Kassam, Brilliance Academy and its subsidiary, Babbage Net School Inc., misrepresented the nature and quality of the tutoring services the companies provided between 2008 and 2012, the indictment charged.

In reality, the businesses provided substandard supplemental educational materials to students, falsely inflated invoices the companies submitted to school districts for purported tutoring services and created and distributed false student progress and improvement reports, prosecutors said.

Suburban father, son charged with education fraud - Chicago Tribune