A Mill Valley financial executive who co-founded a social and environmental justice fund with U2 rock star Bono was sentenced Wednesday to three months in prison after pleading guilty to charges of paying for a corrupt test administrator to fix his son’s ACT exam and inflate his score.
William E. McGlashan, Jr., 57, former senior executive at global private equity firm TPG Capital and co-founder with Bono of The Rise Fund, also was sentenced in federal court in Boston to two years of supervised release, a fine of $250,000 and 250 hours of community service.
On Feb. 10, McGlashan pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud and honest services wire fraud in connection with the “Varsity Blues” case in which college admissions consultant William “Rick” Singer took payments as donations to a sham charity and funneled them into payments for test fixing and bogus athletic credentials for the children of wealthy people.
In 2017, McGlashan agreed to pay Singer to bribe Igor Dvorskiy, a crooked test administrator, to allow Mark Riddell, a corrupt test “proctor,” to secretly correct McGlashan’s son’s ACT exam answers, giving him a fraudulent ACT high score of 34, prosecutors said.
McGlashan made a purported donation of $50,000 from his personal charitable donation fund to Singer’s sham charity. Singer then paid Dvorskiy and Riddell. Singer, Dvorskiy, and Riddell have pleaded guilty for their respective roles in the scheme.
McGlashan joins several other wealthy parents who have pleaded guilty to similar crimes as part of the Varsity Blues case announced in March 2019. Actress Felicity Huffman, one of the first to plead guilty, was sentenced to two weeks in prison.
Actress Lori Loughlin, who pleaded guilty last May with her fashion designer husband Mossimo Giannulli to paying Singer in a scheme to falsify their daughters’ athletic credentials for admission to the University of Southern California, was sentenced to two months in prison. Giannulli was sentenced to five months in prison.
Atherton financier Manuel Henriquez was sentenced to six months in prison, and his wife Elizabeth, to seven months.
Other parents still fighting the charges, including Palo Alto doctor Gregory Colburn and his wife, Amy, are scheduled for trial in September.
One parent, Robert Zangrillo of Florida, was pardoned by former President Trump in January.