Former finance minister Avraham Hirschson dies at 81

Former finance minister Avraham Hirschson died on Monday at age 81.

There was no immediate word on the cause of his death, which was reported by Hebrew media.

Hirschson, a longtime general-secretary of the nationalist Beitar youth movement, entered the Knesset in 1983 with the Likud party. He was appointed tourism minister in 2005 when he joined Kadima, which was made up of Likud and Labor party lawmakers who supported then-prime minister Ariel Sharon’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.

He would later serve as communications minister before becoming finance minister in 2006 as part of Kadima prime minister Ehud Olmert’s government.

A year later, following the opening of a police investigation, Hirschson resigned as treasury chief. He was convicted in 2009 of embezzling millions from the National Labor Federation in Eretz-Israel, a right-wing alternative to the far-larger Histadrut labor federation.

Hirschson was sentenced to five years in prison and fined NIS 450,000. A parole board granted him early release for good behavior in 2012 and he left prison in 2013 after serving 3.5 years behind bars.

In 2011, the Supreme Court rejected an appeal by Hirschson in which he argued that the money he received from the National Labor Federation was a wage and that he had neglected to report it because as a member of Knesset he was not entitled to receive additional wages. The court rejected the notion for being “in contradiction not only with financial realities but also with common sense.”