For the FBI, “a generalized culture of fraud and financial greed” reigned within this Orthodox Jewish school. Three million dollars was stolen.
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.
“Reimburse and repair the damage suffered”
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, located 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 school will allow “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 ”.
“Schools should be places of learning good morals. Cuta leaders have done the opposite by erecting more fraudulent systems to deceive the federal government,” thundered Michael Driscoll, an FBI director quoted in the press release.
