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New YorkThe Jewish school pays $ 8 million to avoid trial
For the FBI, “a generalized culture of fraud and financial greed” reigned within this Orthodox Jewish school. Three million dollars was stolen.
An Orthodox Jewish school in upstate New York admitted financial fraud and embezzlement of public funds (pictured)
AFP
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.
“Repair the damage suffered”
The Central United Talmudical Academy (Cuta), which runs New York State’s largest Hasidic educational institution (a current of Judaism) in the Jewish neighborhood of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, has admitted to embezzling about three million dollars paid by the federal government to provide daily meals to approximately 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 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 believed that the agreement signed with the yeshiva educational institution will allow “compensating and repairing the damage inflicted on the Jewish community” in New York, one of the largest in the world outside of Israel, while “offering the Cuta the possibility of continuing to provide education to the children of the community ”.
“Multiple fraudulent systems”
But for 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 for learning good morals. Cuta leaders have done the opposite by erecting multiple fraudulent systems to deceive the federal government, ”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 a suspended sentence 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 over one billion euros since 2018 to a hundred orthodox Jewish schools in New York and its great north. outskirts. But without strictly respecting their obligations in terms of teaching English, mathematics, science, history or civic and secular education.
(AFP)
