Ringleader Semen Domnitser found guilty in $57M fraud at Claims Conference
Semen Domnister, the former Claims Conference employee
who was charged with leading a $57 million fraud scheme at the Holocaust
restitution organization, was found guilty.
Domnitser and two others, Oksana Romalis and Luba
Kramrish, were found guilty on all counts Wednesday by a U.S. District Court
jury in Manhattan. Their trial lasted four weeks.
Twenty-eight others charged in the fraud scheme had
pleaded guilty.
“To have it all come to closure is extraordinarily
important,” Greg Schneider, the executive vice president of the Claims
Conference, told JTA. “We’re obviously very happy that justice has been served,
but focus on the needs of Holocaust survivors has always been our main priority.”
The fraud was discovered in 2009 and dated back to 1993.
It involved falsifying applications to the Hardship Fund, an account
established by the German government to provide one-time payments of
approximately $3,360 to those who fled the Nazis as they moved east through
Germany, and the Article 2 Fund, through which the German government gives
pension payments of approximately $411 per month to needy Nazi victims who
spent significant time in a concentration camp, in a Jewish ghetto in hiding or
living under a false identity to avoid the Nazis.
Jury deliberations Wednesday took just a few hours.
“With the verdicts against these three defendants, all 31
people who played roles in the theft of $57 million intended to benefit victims
of the Nazi genocide – one of the darkest chapters in all human history – have
been convicted,” U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said in a statement. “We said we
would not stop until we brought to justice those who committed these
unthinkable crimes and today our objective was accomplished.”
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