The Central United Talmudic Academy robbed millions of people to provide meals for 2,000 students
A New York Orthodox Jewish school will pay $ 8 million to the US court to avoid a lawsuit for financial fraud and embezzlement of public funds, court documents released Monday.
The Central United Talmudical Academy (Cuta), which runs the largest Hasidic educational institution (a stream of Judaism) in New York State in the Jewish neighborhood of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, admitted to embezzling about three million dollars paid by the federal government to provide daily meals to around 2,000 school children.
To put an end to the criminal charges and close the federal investigation launched in 2018, Cuta agreed to pay a $ 5 million fine on top of the $ 3 million already returned, according to a federal prosecutor’s statement. state of New York, which is headquartered in Brooklyn.
“The crime inside the Cuta was systemic and far-reaching, in particular for the theft of more than three million dollars destined for students who needed to eat,” protested the federal prosecutor Breon Peace, quoted in the statement.
The magistrate estimated that the agreement signed with the yeshiva educational institution will make it possible to “compensate and repair the damage inflicted on the Jewish community” in New York, one of the largest in the world outside of Israel, while “offering the Cuta la possibility of continuing to provide education to the children of the community ”.
But according to the federal police (FBI), which carried out the investigations, “a generalized culture of fraud and financial greed reigned within the Cuta”.
“Schools should be places of learning good morals. Cuta leaders have done the opposite by erecting multiple fraudulent systems to deceive the federal government,” further thundered Michael Driscoll, an FBI director quoted in the press release. .
Two former school principals pleaded guilty in 2018 to “complicity in financial fraud”, accepted a few years in prison or suspended their sentences and paid heavy fines.
According to the New York Times, which has been working on the scam inside the Cuta for years, the federal government has distributed a total of more than one billion euros since 2018 to around 100 Orthodox Jewish schools in New York and its great northern suburb. . But without strictly respecting their obligations in terms of teaching English, mathematics, science, history or civic and secular education.
