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Hungarian Roma jailed for defrauding Austrian war reparation fund
Nov 19, 2010, 14:13 GMT
Budapest - A Hungarian appeals court confirmed prison sentences on Friday for the leaders of a gang that falsely claimed money from an Austrian fund set up to compensate victims of Nazi forced labour, the state news agency MTI reported.
Katalin Sztojka, the former head of a Roma minority council in southern Hungary, was sentenced to five years imprisonment for her role in orchestrating hundreds of false claims.
Others among over 50 suspects in the case had lesser prison sentences, fines and asset seizures upheld by the court of appeal in Szeged, southern Hungary.
Historians estimate that up to 40,000 Hungarians, mostly Jewish, were transported to the territory of present day Austria for forced labour during World War II.
Austria established a Reconciliation Fund in 2000, at the same time as a similar project in Germany, with the aim of compensating those forced into slavery under the Nazi regime.
The Austrian authorities asked Hungary in 2003 to help track down Roma citizens who may be entitled to payments equivalent to 2,000 to 10,000 dollars after noting that few members of the large ethnic minority had made claims.
Over 12,000 claims had been made by the end of the year, many of them part of an orchestrated attempt to abuse the system.
In many reported cases, illiterate, elderly Roma were duped into submitting claims they did not fully understand, while the organizers of the scam withheld the compensation payments.
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