Israel TV news outlet Ten News (10.tv) has reported that investigators from the FBI’s financial fraud unit have arrived in Israel, as part of their investigation of Lee Elbaz.
Lee Elbaz
Lee Elbaz was arrested in September in New York’s JFK airport after arriving on a flight from Israel, and has been held since under house arrest awaiting trial. Ms. Elbaz was a senior manager at Yukom Communications Ltd which has operated a number of brands over the years including BinaryBook.com and BigOption.com. She was detained because the companies she managed presumably broke US securities law by targeting and taking US clients. Her problems in the US could become more serious, which apparently is the target of the FBI investigators, if authorities are able to authenticate charges of wire fraud, in which the company supposedly conspired to defraud its clients. More on that can be seen in an article from Israeli financial news site Globes.
According to Ten News, the FBI people are interviewing several people in Israel who were involved in Yukom, BinaryBook and BigOption, looking to authenticate and be able to prove their allegations that the brokers conspired to defraud their clients.
The FBI team arrives in Israel at an interesting time, as tomorrow is the deadline for the Israel Securities Authority and Finance Ministry to respond to an appeal made to Israel’s Supreme Court against the country’s new Binary Options Ban law, which passed the Knesset in October and is scheduled to come into effect in two weeks. The appeal, interestingly, was made by Ms. Elbaz’s former boss, Yukom’s controlling shareholder Yossi Herzog.