Indian American Former CEO Indicted for Bribing City Official

A former chief executive officer of a Detroit-based information technology company was indicted on Feb. 2 for his suspected involvement in putting together a scheme to bribe a city official.

Parimal D. Mehta, 54, of Michigan, has been charged in an 11-count indictment filed in the Eastern District of Michigan, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. He has been charged with five counts of honest services mail and wire fraud, one count of federal program bribery, and five counts of unlawfully using interstate facilities to commit bribery under Michigan law.

“From 2009 through August 2016, Mehta made multiple cash payments to Charles L. Dodd, the former Director of Detroit’s Office of Departmental Technology Services, including two cash bribes hand-delivered by Mehta to Dodd in the restrooms of Detroit-area restaurants in 2016,” said the Department of Justice in a statement.

Mehta is also alleged to have employed Dodd’s family members at FutureNet and its subsidiaries. The former director had previously pleaded guilty to bribery on Sept. 27, 2016.

Mehta was said to have paid these bribes to Dodd in return for favored treatment for his company, FutureNet. The company received around $7.5 million from Detroit in 2015 and 2016, according to the indictment, which adds that Mehta and FutureNet made major gains from the influence that Dodd had over the contracts of the city’s administration, expenditures under those contracts, as well as in the procedure of selecting and hiring the contract personnel.

The indictment also says that Mehta obtained confidential information about Detroit’s internal budgets for specific technology projects.

This is not the first incident this year where an Indian American has been accused of being involved in a case of bribery. In January, Harendra Singh, the owner of Water’s Edge restaurant in Long Island City, secretly pleaded guilty to attempting to bribe New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, according to court records. Singh was a major campaign donor for de Blasio when he was running for the mayoral position.

Also, in August 2017, Anuj Sud, 39, who was a former commissioner of Maryland liquor board, was indicted on charges of soliciting bribes while on duty as a state government employee. Federal authorities arrested Sud of Hyattsville, Maryland, as part of the larger investigation about corrupt practices in Prince George’s County liquor board.