Tech tycoon Jie Zhao denies buying Harvard coach’s house for nearly double its value to help his son gain admission
- Chinese-born Jie Zhao says he paid about US$1 million for the US$549,000 Boston-area home because he felt ‘sorry’ for fencing coach Peter Brand
- Zhao never lived in the home and sold it for a steep loss 17 months later, after his son had been admitted to Harvard as a member of Brand’s team
Harvard’s longtime fencing coach sold his suburban Boston home for nearly double its assessed value to a man whose son was later admitted to the school and joined the team — a transaction now under review by the university.
The coach, Peter Brand, received nearly US$1 million in 2016 for the three-bedroom house on a quarter-acre in Needham, which was assessed at the time at US$549,300, The Boston Globe reported.
The buyer, Chinese-born Jie Zhao, whose older son and wife also attended Harvard, never lived in the home and sold it for a steep loss 17 months later.
The sale appears unrelated to the recent college admissions scandal in which wealthy parents have been charged with bribing coaches and helping rig test scores to get their children into some of the nation’s most selective schools, said Claudine Gay, Harvard’s dean of the faculty of arts and sciences.
One of those parents, lawyer Gordon Caplan, of Greenwich, Connecticut, on Friday became the second one to announce plans to plead guilty. He is accused of paying US$75,000 to get a test supervisor to correct answers on his daughter’s ACT exam after she took it.
