Tech CEO jailed in US fraud case is to be transferred to Israel

Former Comverse chief Kobi Alexander serving 30 months for manipulating stock options to serve out rest of sentence in Israel, at his request

An Israeli former technology company CEO serving a 30-month jail sentence in New York for secretly manipulating stock options is to be transferred to an Israeli prison to complete his sentence, Hebrew media reported.

The Israel Prison Service sent a team of guards to Manhattan Thursday to accompany Jacob “Kobi” Alexander, an Israeli citizen, back to Israel. The transfer was made at Alexander’s request, and was facilitated by Israel’s New York consulate, Globes reported.

Alexander vanished in 2006 while under investigation for backdating stock options for his Woodbury-based company, voicemail software maker Comverse Technology Inc.

He frustrated federal authorities for a decade, living comfortably in exile in southwest Africa.

In August 2016, Alexander dropped his extradition fight in Namibia and agreed to plead guilty to securities fraud in federal court in Brooklyn. He was sentenced to a jail term of two-and-a-half years in February 2017.

He admitted to charges that from 1991 through 2005 he exercised options and sold stocks worth approximately $150 million, making a $138 million profit. Of that, about $6.4 million was generated by backdating options.

In addition, the company awarded thousands of stock options to fictional employees and then transferred the awards to a secret slush fund under the name I.M. Fanton, which stood for phantom, court papers say. The scheme allowed Alexander to award those options to real “favored employees” and to himself without board of directors approval, the papers add.

Before he disappeared, Alexander, a US permanent resident, transferred $57 million to Israel, fueling speculation he may have fled there, authorities said. He later turned up in Namibia, where he was briefly detained by local authorities but thereafter was allowed to freely live with his family while fighting extradition.

Over the years, Alexander bought a home in Namibia and invested in local businesses. There were reports that he flew in hundreds of people for his son’s bar mitzvah and that he took up charitable causes in the capital city of Windhoek.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.