A Hong Kong court has convicted 13 parents and a merchant for offering bribes ranging from HK$20,000 to HK$200,000 (US$2,600 to US$25,600) to a kindergarten administrator at the city’s largest international school group in exchange for student enrolments.
Deputy District Judge Amy Chan Wai-mun said on Tuesday that a custodial sentence would be the only suitable punishment for the 14 defendants found guilty of bribing Fatima Rumjahn, a former employee at the English Schools Foundation (ESF), to obtain K1 placements for their children.
Rumjahn, who handled admission applications at Wu Kai Sha International Kindergarten from 2018 to 2021, had earlier pleaded guilty, admitting to her dishonest actions and abuse of power. She served as a witness against the defendants as part of a plea bargain with the prosecution.
She testified during the District Court trial that she accepted payments ranging from HK$20,000 to HK$100,000 between September 2018 and March 2021 from parents whose children were either on the waiting list or who were not slated for interviews because of late applications.
Evidence, including messages between some of the defendants and Rumjahn, showed that the administrator promised to move their children up the waiting list, even though they did not enjoy priority status.
The ESF gives priority to applicants who are the children of its teaching staff, whose siblings are current students, whose parents are alumni, or whose parents buy HK$500,000 bonds.
In recent years, applicants who were foreign passport holders could also be prioritised over locals.
Those who do not fit the relevant criteria would be categorised as “others” – that is, they would not be given priority even if they passed the interview.
The children involved in this case did not fit the criteria, with some of them ranking between 51st and 212th on the waiting list.
The 13 convicted parents are in their mid-thirties to forties and include two couples: housewife Marissa Choy Wai-yin and her partner, project manager Lee Chun-long; and manager Cora Lam Man-hei and her husband, merchant Cheung Ka-ming.
The others are Tsui Wai-him, Julia Wong Wing-man, Ma Yin-man, Kong Ching-men, Vida Lau Ying-kwan, Li Jiebing, Michelle Wong Mei-suet, Mak Wai-ki and Zhu Shuangye.
Siu Yu-pong, also a merchant, was found guilty of offering a HK$200,000 bribe to lock in a K1 placement for a business partner’s daughter in the 2020-21 school year.
The judge found Rumjahn to be a reliable witness and accepted all her testimony that implicated the defendants.
Chan noted that Vida Lau, a lawyer who previously practised in the United Kingdom and also held a doctoral degree in child psychology, had lied to the court when she claimed that the HK$100,000 she gave to Rumjahn was meant for “interview training”.
Chan said Lau, a mother of three, must have dealt with kindergarten interviews for her older children and knew the assessment was not so difficult as to require an applicant to pay such an amount for preparation.
“Spending HK$100,000 to receive training from [Rumjahn] is completely incomprehensible and illogical,” she said.
She applied the same reasoning to dismiss a similar defence from other defendants who denied that the payments to Rumjahn were bribes.
Siu was found to have persuaded the administrator to accept the bribe from his business partner, surnamed Chen, in return for admission for Chen’s daughter.
According to Rumjahn, the girl’s parents did not understand English and would not have passed the admission interview, which generally requires parental attendance.
In the conspiracy between Siu and Rumjahn, the administrator lied to interviewers that Siu would replace Chen in a meeting as he was the mother’s boyfriend. The girl was eventually admitted.
The deputy judge gave full weight to Rumjahn’s words, saying the witness had “no reason” to fabricate a story to implicate the defendants.
All 14 defendants were immediately remanded in custody upon conviction. They will be sentenced along with Rumjahn on March 31.
