Scammer Issued Certificates Under Two Separate CBs at the Same Time

[UPDATE — See update at end.] You may remember the name Sumit Kale. He’s the guy who runs a host of dubious certification bodies but who managed to get them fully-accredited by the equally shady Parveen Sadana of the United Accreditation Foundation (UAF). The IAF regional body APAC has refused to investigate either Kale or Sadana, either, since Sadana paid APAC’s Graeme Drake to look the other way. Drake, apparently willing to crane his neck a full 180 degrees if the money is right, obeyed.

Here’s what Kale has been up to over the past few years:

• In 2022, his company BQSR issued wholly-fake AS9100 certificates. We know they are fake because his CB is not officially recognized or accredited within the IAQG scheme. Despite this, he obtained full UAF accreditation with APAC’s blessing.
• In 2023, we uncovered the nest of companies owned by Kale, including the various fake names he uses to manage them. Oh, and a fake US mailing address that this famous for being used by foreign scammers.
• In 2024, we found that Kale ran to the rescue of indicted CEO Deepak Jain of AINet, who faces decades in US prison for fraud against the Federal government. When we reported that AINet’s original ISO certificates were also fake, Jain ran to the accredited certification body OSS Middle East, who issued overnight certificates, but bearing full accreditation marks. When we reported on that, OSS Middle East silently deleted the certificates, and Kale stepped in to issue AINet additional ISO certs, also overnight. We filed a complaint, which Kale has ignored. (I escalated that to UAF today.)

Now comes a new scandal, reported to me by a whistleblower. It seems Kale issued simultaneous certificates to Nepal’s Gauri Shankar Himalayan Construction Pvt. Ltd. under two of his CBs at once. Three certificates — ISO 9001, ISO 45001, and ISO 14001 — were issued to the company by Kale’s certification body Americo on the same day as he issued duplicates under his other company, BSQR. As of today, the certs all appear in IAF Certsearch summary for Gauri Shankar Himalayan Construction:

When clicking on “verify certificate,” however, only the Americo certificates produce results; the others result in an error 404 page. (This is troubling and means that IAF CertSearch continues to present invalid certificates as valid.)

Now, ISO 17021-1 demands that a certificate only be issued after an audit by the actual certification body. I don’t think anyone ever imagined a scenario where a scammer like Kale would issue multiple certs under multiple logos at once, so there’s no strict rule against it. But 17201-1 does require that —  you know — the CB do an actual audit before issuing a cert. There is no way that two CBs did two simultaneous audits for the same client, at the same time.

I have not filed a complaint on this matter, since the whistleblower already did (I was copied on it.) We will see what hoops Sadana at UAF jumps through to protect his scammer buddy, Kale.

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UPDATE 23 January 2025. I received a copy of an email chain that showed UAF wrote to Kale asking him about the duplication. Kale wrote back and now claims the certificates issued by BQSR were done in 2022, and that the client transferred their certificates to Americo (“AQSR”) recently. Kale says he is withdrawing accreditation of BQSR, so I guess he’s swapping all the old BQSR clients over to his other company, Americo. Kale then throws IAF under the bus and blames them for continuing to display expired certificates anyway.

That’s sort of the IAF’s whole thing, though: that CertSearch can be “trusted” to have accurate information, although if you read their Terms of Service, it says the opposite. But it’s a mess.

Without the ability to see the certs themselves, we have no idea if Kale is telling the truth or not. Given his history, we can’t assume that.

Nepal has no official accreditation body, so companies in that country have to rely on whatever they can find. Including scammers like UAF.

So it could be that Kale is in the clear here and IAF’s incompetence is to blame.

Meanwhile, the UAF is now signing its email under the name “Monika.” Previously, Parveen Sadana used the fake name “Yuliya.” Given UAF’s history of using fake names, we also have no idea if any of those people are real, either.