Former Finance Minister Avraham Hirchson passed away today (Monday) at the age of 81. Hirchson served as Finance Minister between 2006 and 2007, in Ehud Olmert’s government, but was forced to resign when he was suspected of crimes, in a case in which he was finally convicted and sentenced to prison.
Hirchson was born in 1941 in Tel Mond. Between 1970 and 1992, he served as secretary general of the Betar National Youth Movement. At the same time, he was first elected to the Knesset in 1983 as part of the Likud list, and served for a year. In the 1992 elections he was re-elected to the cassette and continued to serve consecutively until 2009.
In 2005, he was appointed Minister of Tourism in Ariel Sharon’s government, and from the beginning of 2006 he also served as Minister of Communications for a short period. Hirchson is one of the Likud members who retired with Sharon from the movement and founded the Kadima party in 2005. After the 2006 elections, he was appointed Minister of Finance in Olmert’s government.
In March 2007, Hirchson was questioned by the police on suspicion of unlawful receipt of funds as part of his activities in the National Workers’ Union and its affiliated Nili organization. Following these suspicions, he resigned from the government. Receiving anything fraudulently under aggravated circumstances, fraud and breach of trust in a corporation, money laundering and false registration in corporation documents.
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Hirchson was sentenced to five years and five months in prison. His appeal to the Supreme Court was not accepted, and he began serving his sentence in Hermon Prison in September 2009. In January 2013, he was released after deducting a third.