A former SIU-Edwardsville employee was sentenced Friday to three years of probation and fined $2,500 for lying about contracts with his mother’s company, federal prosecutors said.

At the time, Kwa Mister, 38, of Fairview Heights, was the director of the Small Business Development Center at SIUE and managed the Highway Construction Preparatory Training Program.

Mister’s mother’s company, Phoenix Support Services, had five contracts to help with the training program, but Mister concealed the “family relationship and the potential conflict of interest” from the university, prosecutors said.

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He lied to SIUE about whether his mother owned Phoenix and then lied to agents of the Transportation Department’s Office of Inspector General and the Labor Department’s Office of Labor Racketeering and Fraud Investigations about whether he’d lied to SIUE, prosecutors said.

Mister pleaded guilty in April to two counts of making a false statement.