'I want to help Peter Brand because I feel so sorry he has to travel so much to go to fencing practice,' he told the newspaper. Brand never asked him to buy the home, Zhao added. His younger son, Zhao said, was a strong fencer and had outstanding grades and test scores that likely would have earned him admission to the university in any case. He said he became friendly with Brand after his older son was admitted to Harvard and began fencing. Zhao said he has been a prominent supporter of fencing since his sons took up the sport as children, and donated $1 million to the nonprofit National Fencing Foundation in 2013. Zhao and his partners sold a majority stake in the company for $80 million in 2012, the Globe reported.

citizen in 1995 and co-founded a telecommunications business in 2003. The Chinese-born Zhao is a Maryland resident who became a U.S. In a statement, Harvard said it retained outside counsel to review the circumstances around the transaction after being made aware of it Monday. Zhao told The Globe in an interview that he purchased the home as an investment and as a favor to Brand and denied it was done to help his son get into the prestigious university.Д«rand did not return messages seeking comment, The Globe reported. Harvard and other schools have not been implicated in the admissions probe. He is accused of paying $75,000 to get a test supervisor to correct answers on his daughter's ACT exam after she took it. One of those parents, lawyer Gordon Caplan, of Greenwich, Connecticut, on Friday became the second one to announce plans to plead guilty. 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. The buyer, 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 coach, Peter Brand, received nearly $1 million in 2016 for the three-bedroom house on a quarter-acre in Needham, which was assessed at the time at $549,300, The Boston Globe reported.

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