The theft of $42 million from funds for Holocaust victims has been uncovered in the US.
A group that stole a large sum of money from two funds paying compensation to victims of the Holocaust has been uncovered in the United States. According to the FBI, the suspects, being in collusion with employees of the funds, sent to charitable organizations more than 5 thousand fictitious appeals with a request to provide material assistance – and thus stole $42 million.
The prosecutor’s office of the Southern District of New York last Tuesday opened a criminal case against 17 people suspected of large-scale embezzlement from the funds of assistance to victims of the Holocaust. According to the TV channel “BBC”, FBI officers began investigating in 2009, when they were approached by representatives of the association “Conference on Jewish Material Claims to Germany”. This public organization was founded in 1951 to assist funds paying compensation to victims of the Holocaust, and is funded by the German government. The association helped foundations distribute two types of payments – lump-sum compensation of $3,600 to Nazi refugees and monthly compensation of $411 to those victims of the Third Reich whose income did not exceed $16,000 a year. As representatives of the “Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany” told investigators, in recent years they had doubts about the honesty of the staff of the New York organizations – the Hardship Fund, which handled the lump sum payments, and the Second Article Fund, which paid the monthly compensations.
An internal investigation, later joined by the FBI, found that six employees of the funds had been abusing their positions since at least 1993.
According to the investigation, they stole $42 million from charitable organizations over the course of years.
The money was withdrawn with the help of fictitious claims for compensation payments. The fact is that the employees of the funds check the authenticity of the data stated in the letters of the victims of the Holocaust, using archives and databases, sometimes referring to public organizations. As the FBI found out, such a large-scale fraud would not have been possible without the participation of the heads of the Holocaust victims’ foundations.
In some cases, the money was paid to people born much later than World War II, in whose documents the perpetrators corrected the dates. One of the applicants for a payout was not Jewish at all.
Most of the applications, the indictment says, were written by the same people, as confirmed by linguistic and handwriting examinations.
According to the FBI, the organizer of the criminal scheme was the head of one of the foundations Semyon Domnitzer and five of his colleagues. Other defendants include Valentina Romashova (aka Tina Rohum), Polina Staroseletskaya, Polina Berenson, Polina Breiter, Lilia Ukrainskaya, Galina Trutina-Demchuk, Marina Zaitseva, Dora Grande, Polina Anoshina, Abram Greenman, Tatiana Greenman, Rosalia Brodetskaya, and Faina Davidson, who live in the United States. Staroseletskaya, Berenson and Breiter were rank-and-file employees of Holocaust victims’ foundations that received applications for compensation. Romashova was an employee of a law firm and placed advertisements in Russian-language New York newspapers for legal assistance to Holocaust victims. Grande was responsible for forging documents, and the other defendants assisted her in doing so.
Most of the defendants, the BBC reports, are on their own recognizance: they were released on $100,000 bail. If the court eventually finds the participants of a major scam guilty, they face up to 20 years in prison.
Source: https://www.gazeta.ru/social/2010/11/10/3436152.shtml