Rabbi Yoshiyahu Pinto
The prosecution has tentatively decided to indict a close
associate of Rabbi Yoshiyahu Pinto on corruption charges for the associate's
mismanagement of a now-defunct charity, Hazon Yeshaya.
Abraham Israel was informed Tuesday of the tentative
decision to indict him for aggravated fraud, falsifying corporate documents,
embezzlement, money laundering and obstruction of justice – charges that would
only become final after a hearing at which Israel could seek to refute the
allegations.
Israel's lawyers have called the suspicions baseless. Pinto,
for his part, is in the middle of another corruption case involving alleged
bribes of senior police officials.
Hazon Yeshaya, which Abraham Israel founded in 1998, raised
money around the world for its soup kitchens in Israel; it also received
funding from the Education Ministry and the Jerusalem municipality. In 2010, it
had turnover of 40 million shekels ($11.4 million). Some of its donations were
used to buy property worth tens millions of shekels.
In November 2011, following complaints from donors who said
they had been cheated, a liquidator was appointed. The liquidator discovered
that Hazon Yeshaya actually distributed only around 3.6 million shekels a year
to the needy, rather than the 33.5 million shekels it claimed in its financial
statements.
A police investigation has raised suspicions that millions
of shekels had been diverted from the charity to a bank account affiliated with
Pinto. In an effort to obtain information about that probe, Pinto allegedly
tried to bribe a senior police officer, Ephraim Bracha.
After Bracha reported that attempt, for which the attorney
general is now considering indicting Pinto, the rabbi tried to obtain immunity
by offering information about alleged bribes given to another senior police
officer, Menashe Arviv.
Prosecutor Uri Corb outlined the suspicions against Israel,
who served as Hazon Yeshaya’s CEO, in a letter to his lawyers on Tuesday.
According to Corb, Israel misled donors about the scope and nature of Hazon
Yeshaya’s activities, both orally and in writing.
He allegedly told donors the charity fed 15,000 needy people
every day, when actually it fed far fewer, ranging from a few hundred to a few
thousand. He allegedly said the charity only helped people classified as needy
by the welfare authorities, including many Holocaust survivors, when actually
this was only true of some recipients.
On Israel’s orders, Corb continued, the charity prepared
fake lists of the people it fed to inflate the scope of its activities. These
lists were shown both to donors and to government agencies like the Social
Affairs Ministry in order to obtain donations, meaning these donations were
obtained fraudulently.
In addition, some of the money donated to the charity was
used not to feed the hungry but to support yeshiva students and subsidize
yeshivas’ purchases of meat, Corb said, adding that income and expenses from
these transactions were falsely recorded as donations on the charity’s books.
Finally, Corb said, Israel paid two former Hazon Yeshaya
employees tens of thousands of dollars to keep them from telling what they knew
about the charity’s transgressions, and also paid off another employee to keep
him from going to the police.
Corb stressed that the letter relates only to the suspicions
against Israel, not to those against Pinto, about which the prosecution has not
yet made a decision. Nevertheless, he said, Pinto will probably be called as a
prosecution witness against Israel, so the fact that both are represented by
Eli Zohar’s law firm creates “a real fear of a conflict of interests.”
Israel’s lawyers, Ilan Sofer and Guy Wilf, said in a
statement the prosecution’s suspicions were so baseless they didn’t even
provide grounds for a civil suit, much less a criminal proceeding. Even the
prosecution hasn’t accused Israel of taking any money for himself, they added.
According to the lawyers, Hazon Yeshaya fed tens of
thousands of needy people until the investigation caused it to collapse, “and
no other organization has taken its place and filled the void.” The
investigation thus wreaked havoc both on Israel, who “was forced out of his job
... and saw his life’s work destroyed,” and on the needy the charity once
supported, “who aren’t receiving food or aid from any other source,” they
wrote.
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