AP News, January 8th, 2008
A court convicted an accountant Tuesday of embezzling $1.8 million from the Helsinki Federation for Human Rights to support his mistress — a crime that forced the respected group to fold.
The Vienna-based Helsinki said on its Web site that the fraud scheme forced it to seek bankruptcy and a decision on final liquidation is expected by the end of the month.
The Vienna court sentenced the 43-year-old accountant to three years in jail, two of which were suspended. His 31-year-old girl friend was sentenced to two years, 16 months of which could be served on parole, the Austria Press Agency reported. The names of the two were not immediately available.
The accountant, while working for Helsinki, channeled money to his bank account under the guise of financing human rights projects, APA's court report said. He also used the organization's ATM card for personal purposes. But his misuse of funds went unnoticed for six years.
The agency reported that his mistress, 31, gambled away up to $7,000 a week at poker and once told him she needed $44,000 to open her own hair salon. She also used it to finance a breast augmentation and a nose job.
The man testified that the woman told him she was expecting a large inheritance, and had promised she would pay him back. He said he found out about the plastic surgery only after it had been performed. He said he would not have agreed to financing the operations had he known about them ahead of time.
"I was basically her slave," APA quoted the man, who is married and has children. The couple met in a pizzeria where the woman worked as a waitress.
The woman testified she was unaware of the illegal origins of the money. She was convicted of concealment and receipt of stolen goods.
Helsinki's top official said the group had no choice but to shut down.
"This had to be done due to the Federation's grave financial crisis caused by an economic crime," Ulrich Fischer, IHF president, wrote in the statement posted Dec. 7 on the group's Web site.
"The former IHF financial manager has been taken in pretrial detention after he confessed to having embezzled a large amount of money over several years," Fischer wrote then.
According to its Web site, the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights worked as a an umbrella group for rights groups across Europe. One of its main focuses was to monitor compliance with international human rights standards.
Helsinki has said that its aim was to protect and strengthen civil groups that monitor and report on human rights issues and provide an common international platform for those groups.
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On the Net:
http://www.ihf-hr.org
