By Nate Raymond
BOSTON (Reuters) – A son of the co-founder of aircraft interior maker B/E Aerospace was indicted on Wednesday on charges he participated in a vast U.S. college admissions bribery and fraud scheme to secure his daughter’s enrollment at Georgetown University.
Federal prosecutors in Boston said Amin Khoury, 54, agreed in 2014 to pay $200,000 in bribes to Georgetown’s former tennis coach through a middleman in exchange for designating his daughter as an athletic recruit.
The coach, Gordon Ernst, has pleaded not guilty to charges that he accepted bribes to help wealthy parents’ children win admission to Georgetown as purported tennis recruits.
Khoury’s attorney, Eoin Beirne, said he looked forward to rebutting the government’s claims.
“His child’s college application was completely accurate and contained no misrepresentations about being a fake athlete or anything else,” he said.
Fifty-eight people have now been charged in the “Varsity Blues” scandal, in which prosecutors said parents conspired with California college admissions consultant William “Rick” Singer to fraudulently secure their children’s college admissions.
The parents include “Desperate Housewives” star Felicity Huffman, who received a 14-day prison sentence, and “Full House” star Lori Loughlin, who was sentenced in August to two months in prison.
Singer pleaded guilty in March 2019 to facilitating cheating on college entrance exams and using bribery to secure the admission of students to colleges as fake athletic recruits.
Unlike other parents, though, prosecutors did not accuse Khoury of going through Singer to bribe Ernst but instead alleged he paid bribes to the coach through a third party, a tennis recruiter in Massachusetts.
Khoury, a resident of Palm Beach, Florida, and Mashpee, Massachusetts, is a son of Amin J. Khoury, a founder and former chief executive of B/E Aerospace, which merged with Rockwell Collins Inc in 2017.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; editing by Jonathan Oatis)
