Three men who rorted $2 million in government subsidies by signing students up to sham education courses have been jailed.

In 2014 and 2015, Baljit Singh, Rakesh Kumar and Mukesh Sharma signed 350 adult students from Australia and overseas onto vocational courses at the training colleges they owned, the St Stephen Institute of Technology in Reservoir and the Symbiosis Institute of Technical Education in Footscray, and received subsidies from the Victorian government.



Baljit Singh.

The registered training organisations were real and had classrooms and staff members, but the enrolments were in name only. The colleges failed to provide any genuine teaching and maintained false timetables, and the only assessments submitted on students' behalf were either plagiarised or completed through generic templates, to deceive the regulating agency, the Australian Skills Quality Authority.

In some cases, the County Court heard recently, students were enrolled in business management courses without their knowledge and fake administration records were created.