Bar Refaeli falls/Instagram. Screenshot
A blow to Bar Refaeli's family: Neto will pay over NIS 18 million in fines, according to the announcement of the Competition Authority which reached agreements with the company on financial sanctions, for alleged violations of the Food Law.
Neto is one of the largest public companies in Israel in the field of food production and import, which owns, among others, the brands Williger, Tivon Will and more. The Ezra family is the controlling owner, and Adi Ezra, Bar's husband, has direct ownership of almost a quarter of the company's shares.
According to the agreements between Neto and the Competition Authority, Neto will pay a total of approximately NIS 13.7 million for violations of sections of the Food Law that deal with interference in display areas at retailers and price recommendations to retailers in a manner designed to give them a competitive advantage over other products in the store. In addition, you will pay a net total of approximately NIS 4.5 million for submitting an incomplete response to the authority's data request.
This is not the family's first entanglement recently - just last week the Tax Authority announced that the chairman of Neto Dodi Ezra, the father of Rafali's husband, was fined NIS 850,000.
According to the Tax Authority's announcement from last week, Ezra left Israel with 1.7 million NIS in cash He did not declare them. Ezra was on his way to Corfu, Greece, when in the suitcase he placed in the belly of the plane were found piles of bills with a total value of 475,695 euros.
In his investigation, he said that he had purchased a house on the island of Corfu in the amount of 2.8 million euros and that the purpose of the funds was to pay the payment. The latter to the contractors and service providers who renovated the property. He also said that for the purpose of purchasing the house he transferred the money by bank transfer, and when asked why he did not also transfer the balance of the payment to those professionals, he replied that he hoped to receive a discount for the payment in cash.
The tax authority explained that "the committee saw seriously his intention to pay in cash to get a discount, when on the face of it it appears that this is a payment that will not be declared, in whole or in part, to the tax authorities in Greece. His investigation reveals that these are funds withdrawn from his private bank accounts, and that they originate, among other things, from funds that were distributed as dividends from the company in large amounts. According to Ezra, he did not report the funds by mistake and was not aware of the reporting method upon leaving Tel Aviv."
The Tax Authority further stated that "in light of the high financial scope of the violation, the fact that the violator did not present references regarding the source of the money, and the fact that the violator is a businessman who often flies abroad, who knew about the reporting obligation and yet chose not to find out how to report the funds, and in light of The fact that he chose to send such a large amount of money in a suitcase and not carry it with him, an act that on the face of it raises a concern for concealment, the committee decided to impose a financial sanction on the violator in the amount of NIS 850,000. This is the largest financial sanction imposed by the Tax Authority in 2022 for this offense."
Bar Refaeli is known for her entanglement with the Tax Authority, which ended with the star being convicted of a series of offenses and receiving nine months of actual imprisonment, to be served with community service, subject to the opinion of the commissioner of community service, plus a fine of NIS 2.5 million and a suspended sentence. In addition, her mother Tzipi Rafali, served an actual prison sentence as part of a plea deal in the tax offenses case.
At the heart of the case was the question of whether Rafaeli was a resident of Israel in the years 2009-2012, in which, according to the estimates of the tax authority, she generated income of approximately NIS 24 million.
According to the indictment filed in the plea agreement in which Tzipi and Bar Refaeli admitted, the two carried out a series of actions to avoid paying tax on those incomes. For example, the mother's concern that in three broken apartments she lived in in Israel during those years, it was written that the tenants were her brother or mother.
Another charge refers to the years 2007-2014, and concerns commissions of NIS 2.5 million received by Tzipi Refaeli for Bar's work as a model abroad. Accounts of companies under her control," the prosecutor's office says. "Or to other foreign accounts. Tzipi Rafaeli did not report in the annual reports she submitted to the income tax."
A similar, but separate, indictment states that the mother and daughter will admit that they did not report income of NIS 4.5 million that they earned in 2007. The funds were deposited in the account of a company called Sweet Life that was established in Singapore and was controlled by Bar Refaeli - and were not reported to the tax authorities in Israel.
The fourth charge in the indictment concerns "celeb discounts" received by Bar in 2009-2015. It refers to the practice according to which a company gives its products to celebrities for free or at huge discounts, in order to gain positive publicity from the celebrity's use of the product. According to the charge to which the two will admit, in those years the celeb discounts received by Bar reached a value of 2.5 million shekels. Among other things, she received a discount in paying the rent in the Yoo and W luxury towers, and a discount in the price of the land to buy an apartment in the project called "Blu".