Three San Antonio family members \u2014 one of them a former Fiesta Rey Feo \u2014 who pleaded guilty to rigging multimillion-dollar government contracts will pay millions in civil penalties as part of a settlement reached with federal officials.<\/p>\n
Kenneth Flores, Irma Flores\u00a0and Christopher Flores pleaded guilty in 2023 to criminal fraud and gratuities charges. A federal indictment alleged that the family members eliminated competition and fixed contract awards and prices on Army contracts for janitorial services at military hospitals. They were sentenced in 2024.<\/p>\n
Federal officials filed a lawsuit against the Flores family members and\u00a0KDHK Inc., Kenneth Flores\u2019 company, in federal court in San Antonio.<\/p>\n
The family members agreed to collectively pay $2.5 million in civil penalties under the False Claims Act, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Texas.<\/p>\n
Kenneth Flores and Irma will jointly pay the federal government $2 million and Christopher\u00a0Flores will pay $500,000, according to the agreement. Irma Flores is the mother of Christopher\u00a0Flores and Kenneth\u00a0Flores.<\/p>\n
The three Flores family members admitted to paying bribes to two Army civilian workers \u2014 John “Chip”\u00a0Mathes and Karissa Kelley \u2014 for illegal acts that benefited their businesses.\u00a0Federal officials previously imposed $547,613.92 in civil penalties against the two federal employees.<\/p>\n
Prosecutors also said Ken\u00a0Flores and Kelley were involved in a sexual relationship.\u00a0<\/p>\n
As part of the scheme, a contract for $59.5 million was awarded in 2014 to Helping Hands Inc. of San Antonio, which was led by Antonio\u00a0Flores, Irma Flores’ husband and father of Ken and Christipher Flores.<\/p>\n
An $83.6 million contract was awarded in 2018 to another maintenance business, Allegiance Environmental Services, that was run by Kenneth\u00a0Flores.<\/p>\n
Irma\u00a0Flores was chief financial officer of Helping Hands Inc. and bookkeeper for Allegiance Environmental Services.<\/p>\n
Christopher Flores was vice president of Helping Hands Inc. and ran another business called Alliance Supply, which was used to funnel kickbacks to Mathes and Kelley, according to federal officials.<\/p>\n
Kenneth\u00a0Flores was sentenced to four years in prison, Christopher Flores was sentenced to two years and Irma Flores was sentenced to five years probation.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In 2018, Kenneth\u00a0Flores was crowned Rey Feo as part of Fiesta celebrations. Also known as Fiesta\u2019s \u201cPeople\u2019s King,\u201d the Rey Feo is elected annually by members of the Rey Feo Consejo Educational Scholarship Foundation, which supports the Rey Feo Scholarship Program.<\/p>\n
In 2003, Irma\u00a0Flores became the first Hispanic woman to serve as president of the Fiesta San Antonio Commission.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Three San Antonio family members \u2014 one of them a former Fiesta Rey Feo \u2014 who pleaded guilty…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":450466,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[82,84,83],"class_list":["post-450465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-antonio","tag-san-antonio","tag-san-antonio-headlines","tag-san-antonio-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/450465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=450465"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/450465\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/450466"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=450465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=450465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=450465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}