The State Attorney's Office announced today (Tuesday) that it is considering indicting Tzachi Azar, Shlomo Isaac, and Shai Penso - the three controlling shareholders and officers of the public company 'Yount Credit', which provided non-bank credit, and who were also the controlling shareholders of the private company 'Yount', in a number of cases, subject to a hearing.
Five additional suspects were also summoned for questioning, including the public company's compliance officer Yoav Tzabar, the company's advisor Dudu Ben-Naim, former minister Moshe Kahlon, who served as chairman of the company's board of directors between June 2021 and June 2022, and the companies themselves.
They are suspected of fraud against the public company and reporting offenses - each according to his share. The offenses attributed to Kahlon are breach of trust in a corporation and failure to report in the "Unit Credit" affair.
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The case is being handled by the Securities Department of the Taxation and Economic Prosecutor's Office and is being investigated by the Investigations, Intelligence and Trade Control Department of the Securities Authority.
The first affair is attributed to the three controlling shareholders - Azar, Isaac (who currently serves as president of the Israel Insurance Agents Association) and Panso, Ben-Naim and others, and focuses on an allocation transaction from 2020, in which 2 million shares of the public company worth NIS 50 million were allocated to the private company of the controlling shareholders and two additional advisors.
According to suspicion, the purpose of the transaction was to pay the bond debts of the controlling shareholders in the private company, and the outline of the transaction that was approved by the company's institutions was substantially different from the transaction that was actually carried out. Thus, the controlling shareholders and consultants, with the assistance of the compliance officer, made false representations to the institutions of the public company and fraudulently received shares worth approximately NIS 50 million.
Another case is primarily attributed to the controlling shareholders, led by Azer, and the operator of the company's Nazareth branch. It deals with suspicions related to embezzlement of NIS 5 million and other financial irregularities at the Nazareth branch, which were discovered by Yoav Tzabar at the end of 2020 and were allegedly known to the controlling shareholders, who hid them from the board of directors and the public.
It is suspected that he reported his findings to Chairman Kahlon considerably late, only at the beginning of 2022, and Kahlon instructed him not to disclose his findings to the board of directors for fear of damaging the company's credit rating.
Only in mid-2022 did Tzabar decide to report to the public company's board of directors, which immediately acted to appoint an external auditor and publish the findings to the public.
In light of the disclosure of the affairs to the public, the stock exchange suspended trading in the stock and removed it from the indices, the company's credit rating was downgraded, and the auditors withdrew their approval of the financial statements for the years 2020-2022.
In another case, the controlling shareholder and CEO, Tzachi Azar, is suspected of withdrawing personal funds from the public company in the amount of approximately 400,000 shekels.
