Ukrainian Sentenced for Embezzling Nazi Compensation

A court in Hildesheim, Germany on Monday sentenced a former Ukrainian member of parliament to five years and ten months in prison on Monday for embezzling compensatory funds meant for victims of the Nazi regime. The court ruled that Victor Scherdizki had misappropriated around €2 million as the director of a bank in Ukraine in 1995 as a result of which German government compensation for former forced laborers in Ukraine could not be paid. An accomplice of Scherdizki has also been sentenced to four years and three months in prison. The judges said that the accused had siphoned the funds with the help of fictitious credit agreements and finally invested the amount in a German cement company via other companies. The money was part of a payment made by the German to a Ukrainian "funding pool for bilateral understanding and reconciliation." Following the disappearance of the money, the Ukrainian government had to step in order to compensate for the Nazi-regime victims.