Glam and the companies appealed to the Supreme Court against their conviction and the severity of their sentence, but as mentioned, their appeal was rejected.
Regarding the severity of the punishment, Judge Uri Shoham ruled that "in offenses involving fraud against tax authorities, as well as in offenses of money laundering, a fairly wide range of punishments can be indicated, but the trend emerging in this court's rulings is towards aggravating and harsher punishments for those criminals who reach into the public purse and severely violate the principle of equality in bearing the tax burden, and indirectly also harm the social fabric in Israel.".
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Judge Elyakim Rubinstein noted that "thieves from the public purse by not paying taxes, even if they are disguised as normative people, when they take off their clothes they will be revealed as thieves like any thief from the underworld and worse, because among people they are considered law-abiding like any other person from the community, and some may mistake them.".
The ruling indicates that "saved tax" constitutes "prohibited property" for the purposes of Section 3(a) of the Money Laundering Prohibition Law, and therefore establishes the grounds for forfeiture set forth in the law.
The state argued that property worth millions of shekels should be confiscated, due to the fact that it was purchased with saved tax money, and the court ruled that all the elements of the offense of Section 3(a) were indeed proven, including the property being prohibited property, and left the confiscation in place.
The Supreme Court even rejected Glam's argument that the ruling should have referred to the final tax amount he had to pay according to his attorney's calculations, and not to the extent of the income he concealed.
Judge Shoham ruled that there is no need to calculate what Glam's profit would have been if he had acted as an "honest person," but rather, "it is sufficient that this is a case of concealment of income on extremely high levels, and there is no need for further calculations beyond that.".
The state was represented by the Fiscal Department of the State Attorney's Office.
