INCHEON (Yonhap) -- A total of 21 parents received suspended prison terms on Tuesday for securing unlawful admission for their children to foreigner-only schools in South Korea based on fraudulent documents, according to court officials.
The Incheon District Court delivered guilty verdicts to the parents for illegally putting their children in schools for children of foreign residents with fabricated passports and foreign citizenship papers which they bought from brokers.
South Korean students, in principle, can be enrolled at international schools here only if one of their parents is a foreign national.
One mother acquired documents for Bulgarian and British citizenship through brokers and submitted forged passports to get her daughter admitted to a local school for children of foreign residents, said court officials.
The other defendant, a daughter of the chairman of one of the major conglomerates here, also purchased a fake Guatemalan passport and used it to transfer her daughter to another international school in Seoul, they said.
Other parents also bought forged passports from African countries from brokers and submitted copies to local international schools, they added.
Most of the parents are known to be upper-class, such as doctors and owners of major conglomerates.
Three brokers who commissioned illicit admissions and another broker who issued fake passport also received prison terms that vary from one year and two months to two years and six months, they said.
Prosecutors in October indicted a total of 47 parents on charges of forgery of private documents.
The sentencing trial for the remaining 26 is slated for Feb. 20, they added.
Following the scandal, the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology launched an audit into 51 international schools in the country to determine if they have admitted students who failed to meet enrollment requirements.
