Things just got worse for Bill McGlashan, the former TPG Growth managing partner and co-founder of its Rise impact investment fund, who was charged earlier this year in the college admissions scandal.
On Tuesday federal prosecutors in Massachusetts brought new charges against McGlashan and other defendants in the scandal, which erupted earlier this year when prosecutors accused financial executives, Hollywood celebrities and others of paying bribes to get their children into schools including Yale University and the University of Southern California.
McGlashan and ten more of the 15 parents charged in the college admissions scandal allegedly conspired to commit federal program bribery “by bribing employees of the University of Southern California (USC) to facilitate their children’s admission,” according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s office in Massachusetts on Tuesday. In exchange for these bribes, university employees allegedly passed off the defendants’ children as athletic recruits, “with little or no regard for their athletic abilities,” or as members of favored admission categories, according to the statement.
Additionally, McGlahsan and three other defendants were hit with additional charges of wire fraud and honest services wire fraud for allegedly using bribery and other forms of fraud to receive fake standardized test scores and gain admission to elite colleges, either as athletic recruits or as members of other favored admissions categories. An attorney for McGlashan did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.
The scandal has ensnared both Wall Street and the Hollywood elite. Former PIMCO chairman Douglas Hodge and Hercules Capital’s founder and former CEO Manuel Henriquez recently pleaded guilty to the charges against them, while earlier this month Gordon Caplan, a former partner in Willkie Farr & Gallagher’s private equity practice, was sentenced to one month in federal prison for his role in the scandal. Meanwhile, actress Felicity Huffman is currently serving a 13-day sentence in a federal prison in California after her guilty plea.
The new indictment, which supersedes two earlier indictments, alleges that McGlashan paid William “Rick” Singer — the alleged mastermind of the scandal —to enlist someone to purportedly proctor his son’s ACT exam and secretly correct the answers, as well as to pass his son off as a football recruit. Singer ran a company called The Edge College & Career Network and a nonprofit organization called the Key Worldwide Foundation.
“The defendants, all of whom were arrested in March 2019, were previously charged with conspiring” with Singer and others to bribe SAT and ACT exam administrators “to allow a test taker to secretly take college entrance exams in place of their children, or to correct the children’s answers after they had taken the exams,” according to the statement. “The defendants were also previously charged with conspiring to launder the bribes and other payments in furtherance of the fraud by funneling them through Singer’s purported charity and his for-profit corporation, as well as by transferring money into the United States, from outside the United States, for the purpose of promoting the fraud scheme.”
The conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud and honest services mail and wire fraud charges carry a maximum prison sentence of 20 years, three years of supervised release, and a fine of either $250,000 or “twice the gross gain or loss, whichever is greater,” according to the statement. The conspiracy to commit federal programs bribery charge carries similar supervised release and fine terms, along with a sentence of up to five years in prison.
