Cheftziba CEO Boaz Yona was convicted on a nine-count indictment by the Jerusalem District Court on Monday after the court accepted a plea bargain agreement.
As per the agreement, Yona will serve a seven-year jail term and will make compensatory payments amounting to NIS 4 million.
Many of people whose lives were shattered by Yona’s corruption were angered over the plea bargain, which they view as a very light sentence considering the fact that he made of with significantly larger sums of money, leaving many people paying for mortgages on homes that are not being constructed.
In the chareidi sector alone, his actions impacted thousands of families.
(Yechiel Spira – YWN Israel)
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2 Responses
maybe he should get an apartment on the tenth floor of a non existent building!
wait a minute, they did the same thing here in the us!
Interesting that about ten or fifteen years ago his uncle pulled a very similar stunt (albeit on a smaller scale), spent a few years in jail, and is now living very comfortably in Toronto. Boaz himself was seemingly hoping to spend his jail time in Italy until his anti-semitic fellow inmates there started leaving cigarette burns on his arms and he stopped fighting extradition. The most likely explanation I can think of for the prosecutors agreeing to such an easy deal (from his point of view) is that they are being bribed. Interesting also then he first came back to Eretz Yisroel and the plea bargain was announced, some committee chairwoman in the Keneset started making noises about investigating why the prosecutors were agreeing to such an easy deal, but then nothing more was heard about it. Could it be that she was looking for a share of the bribes to keep her quiet?
In any case, it’s doubtful that the frum politicians, however well intentioned they are, can do much to overcome the powerful incentives of bribery, and all we can do is to daven to Hashem to make Boaz make good to the people he stole from (my son included). Hashem’s Hand is not too short to come up with ways of doing that. A gemar chasima tova to everyone.