Three local restaurant owners are charged with pretending their employees worked in the computer industry to help them fraudulently obtain visas. Charging documents say Prashanth Goguri, Kishore Konda and Mannem Reddy are the owners of Symmetric Solutions, which operates Minerva Indian Cuisine and other retail businesses in Virginia and Maryland. From 1998 until last year, the documents say, the three men submitted fraudulent immigration applications on behalf of their workers, telling authorities that the employees worked in computer technology, rather than in the restaurant industry.

That allowed employees to obtain lawful permanent resident status in the United States when they otherwise wouldn’t have been eligible, prosecutors say.