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Aryeh Deri admits to tax offenses as part of plea deal, will resign from Knesset [1]
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Date: 2023-01
Attorney-General Avichai Mandelblit’s office formally announced on Thursday that Shas party head Aryeh Deri would be indicted as part of a plea deal in which he will admit to a pair of tax offenses in exchange for resigning from the Knesset and paying a NIS 180,000 fine.
A statement from Mandelblit’s office confirmed he would not seek moral turpitude charges against Deri, allowing the leader of the ultra-Orthodox party to eventually return to the Knesset, as soon as the next elections.
Deri, a former interior minister, previously served time for a bribery conviction before returning to the Knesset in 2013.
In January this year, Mandelblit announced that he intended to file criminal charges against Deri, pending a hearing.
Deri had initially been suspected of bribery when the investigation began five years ago, but Mandelblit ended up accusing him of the lesser offenses of failing to report income to tax authorities on two occasions and additional tax offenses committed while selling Jerusalem apartments to his brother Shlomo Deri.
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In 2018, police recommended filing charges against Deri on suspicion of committing fraud, breach of trust, obstructing court proceedings, money laundering and tax offenses involving millions of shekels. In 2019, then-state prosecutor Shai Nitzan similarly recommended charging the Shas chairman, but many of those charges were ultimately dropped earlier this year.
In the final plea deal announced Thursday, Deri will admit to just two offenses: failing to accurately report the value of a property he sold to his brother in 2013 — which Deri had valued at NIS 4.25 million ($1.3 million) but was actually worth close to NIS 6 million ($1.9 million); and helping his brother write a false statement about the property’s true value.
Deri said in a statement following the announcement that he had “decided to take responsibility for mistakes that were made without any malevolent intent, to put the affair behind me and avoid an entire trial on the matter.”
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He stressed, however, that he would continue to lead the Shas party “with full force and faith.”
Deri served 22 months in prison from 2000 to 2002, after he was convicted of taking bribes as interior minister in the 1990s. He reclaimed the leadership of Shas shortly before the 2015 Knesset elections, ousting Eli Yishai, who had led the party in his absence.
He returned to his Interior Ministry post in 2016, after a court ruled that his prior conviction did not disqualify him from the position.
The Movement for Quality Government in Israel said following Mandelblit’s announcement that it will appeal to the High Court of Justice against the plea deal.
“It can’t be that a public figure who committed offenses of this type can return in the future to public positions,” the group said in a statement, calling the agreement “shameful.”
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