US college admissions scam: Chinese mum Xiaoning Sui to plead guilty to securing son’s UCLA spot through US$100,000 bribe
- Sui has been detained in Spain since September, unlike 33 other parents involved in scandal, who were allowed to post bond and remain out of custody
- As part of plea deal, prosecutors and lawyers propose that she spend no additional time in jail after extradition to US
Both prosecutors and lawyers for Xiaoning Sui, a Chinese mother detained in Madrid on charges of securing her son’s admission to UCLA through bribery, have proposed she spend no additional time in prison once she is extradited to the United States, according to court records and her lawyer.
Sui, 48, a Chinese national and resident of British Columbia, Canada, will plead guilty to a single count of federal programme bribery, according to a plea agreement filed in US federal court. She was arrested by Spanish authorities in September.
Her lawyer, Martin Weinberg, and prosecutors from the US attorney’s office in Massachusetts agreed that a penalty of time served – the months Sui will have spent in a Madrid jail by the time she is sentenced in Boston – would be “a reasonable and appropriate” resolution to her case, her plea agreement said.
“This was an agreement that accomplished her principal objective, which was to have the government agree that no additional term of imprisonment would be required when she reached the United States,” Weinberg said by telephone. A spokeswoman for the US attorney’s office in Massachusetts declined to comment.
In the plea agreement, Sui admitted working with William “Rick” Singer, the Newport Beach consultant who for a decade oversaw a multimillion-dollar fraud that breached some of the country’s most prestigious schools to the alleged benefit of his star-studded clientele.
