Safed mayor and officials detained on bribery allegations

The mayor of Safed was arrested Monday along with three other municipal officials on suspicion of corruption, bribery, and tax fraud connected with real estate deals.

In the morning, police and income tax officers swooped down on the Safed municipality and detained Mayor Ilan Shohat and the three other municipal employees, one of them a senior official.

Police seized files and computers, Channel 10 News reported. They also searched the homes of the four to collect evidence.

Shohat has denied the allegations against him.

The arrest was part of police Case 1431, which is investigating the promotion of real estate projects through the offering of bribes to municipality employees and their relatives, Hebrew-language media reported.

Police allege that business cronies of the suspects offered them bribes and favors in exchange for special treatment from the city, according to a statement.

The police worked in collaboration with the Diamond Unit of the Israel Tax Authority to make the arrests as part of an undercover operation.

Authorities searched the offices of the Safed municipality in addition to the homes of the suspects, seizing documents deemed necessary for the investigation.

They have yet to announce whether they intend to extend the suspects’s detention.

Safed has been prone to corrupt leadership. In January, its former mayor Oded Hameiri was sentenced to eight months in prison on bribery charges.

Shohat was the center of a police investigation brought to light in December 2015 shortly before the parliamentary elections.

He was slated to be the number four candidate on Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu list. While claiming the investigation was part of a smear campaign against him, Shohat withdrew his candidacy and returned to run the Safed municipality just days before being sworn into the Knesset.