Former minister Stas Misezhnikov will be indicted on multiple counts including fraud and receiving bribes, Channel 1 news reports.
He is suspected of giving NIS 1 million ($270,000) toward a students’ festival in the southern port city of Eilat and then asking organizers to employ his partner in return. Organizers complied, paying her tens of thousands of shekels.
Former tourism minister Stas Misezhnikov in court on Wednesday, December 24, 2014 (FLASH90)
He is also believed to have sent aides to buy cocaine, which he used during official events in Israel and abroad.
Misezhnikov, who was a member of Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu party, is one of a string of former officials, among them an erstwhile Yisrael Beytenu deputy minister, facing charges in one of the most far-reaching public corruption cases in Israel’s history.
Ten people in total, among them top former local politicians and party officials, were charged with a range of financial felonies in the case in August, in what the Justice Ministry described as “the first round” of indictments.
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