A court sentenced a businessman once considered among Israel's most powerful to two years in prison on Monday for rigging the price of his company's shares, the justice ministry said. The Tel Aviv District Court also fined Nochi Dankner 800,000 shekels ($210,500, 197,000 euros) and gave him an additional 12-month suspended sentence.
He was convicted in July of seeking to inflate the value of a 2013 stock offering in his IDB Holding Corporation by having friends, relatives and associates buy the shares at high prices. Dankner was ousted from control of the heavily indebted IDB by shareholders in 2013. The holding company had for a time been one of Israel's biggest, controlling a major supermarket chain, a mobile phone company and cement, construction and insurance businesses.
Dankner's lawyer is to appeal, media reported. One of Dankner's associates was sentenced to a year in prison as an accomplice to the share scam. Considered a symbol of what late Israeli president Shimon Peres once called "swinish capitalism", Dankner became, with other tycoons, a focus of popular derision during a wave of mass social protests in 2011.
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