The Supreme Court ruled Aryeh Deri is ineligible to serve as a cabinet minister.Israel’s top court ruled 10-1 on Wednesday that Aryeh Deri, leader of the Shas party and a key ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, should not be allowed to serve as a cabinet minister because of a February 2022 conviction for tax fraud.
Netanyahu should remove Deri from his post, the court ruling said. Such a move would risk plunging the country into a political crisis.
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The High Court had been asked to rule on whether it was legally reasonable to appoint Deri to posts in Netanyahu’s cabinet despite his tax fraud conviction
Judges ruled that his appointment “cannot stand.”
“This is, among other things, due to his backlog of criminal convictions,” and his failure to retire from public life as he said he would do when being sentenced in the tax fraud case.
The underlying legal issue is whether Deri’s tax fraud conviction constitutes a crime of moral turpitude. Until November’s elections, that would have disqualified him from serving in government.
But Netanyahu and his allies made a change to the law in the wake of their election victory, clearing the way for Deri to become a minister.
Deri was a member of the Knesset at the time of his tax fraud conviction last year.
He resigned as a lawmaker rather than giving the head of the election commission a chance to rule on whether the conviction disqualified him from serving as a minister.
This means that the legal question of whether Deri’s fraud conviction counts as a crime of moral turpitude remains unresolved.
Deri allies have been signaling this week that the Shas party leader would not resign his ministerial post even if the court ruling went against him.
