Israel model guilty of tax evasion sees mum jailed

Israeli model Bar Refaeli pleaded guilty to charges of providing false tax returns while living abroad in order to avoid Israeli taxes on income nearing $10.2 million, according to the BBC.

Following a plea bargain agreement made last month, Refaeli was sentenced to nine months of community service and ordered to pay a fine of $724,787 by the court in Tel Aviv.

Her mother, Tzipi Refaeli, who works as Bar’s agent, will be sent to prison for 16 months after being charged with failure to report income, avoiding paying taxes and aiding someone else in evading tax payments.

The indictment accuses her of signing leases for her daughter under the names of other family members to blur Refaeli’s actual residency status and refrained from declaring her own income as her daughter’s agent.

Israel model fined, mother jailed for tax evasion

In addition, they were ordered to pay a $1.5 million fine in addition to paying back millions of taxes owed to the state.

The case dates back to 2016, when Tzipi was arrested on suspicion of having failed to report income and of having misled the tax assessor, thus avoiding tax on income from abroad estimated at tens of millions of shekels, Globes reported.

She said she spent most of the years in question outside of Israel, thus exempting her from paying the taxes.

Last year, she appealed to the High Court of Justice against a lower court decision that ordered her to pay taxes on eight million shekels ($2.4 million) for earnings abroad in the years 2009-2010.

She claimed that her past relationship with Hollywood movie star Leonardo DiCaprio was tight enough to be considered a family unit, making her home base the US rather than Israel.

However, the state argued that she was actually resident in Tel Aviv during much of this time, in apartments rented under the names of her relatives.

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