Montreal’s First Jewish Mayor To Serve 1 Year In Prison For Fraud
Image by getty images
MONTREAL (JTA) — Montreal’s first Jewish mayor was handed a one-year prison term and two years probation following his January conviction on eight counts of corruption, breach of trust, and fraud.
“I can guarantee you and my family that I will be a better person when I come out,” Michael Applebaum said in provincial court at his sentencing hearing yesterday.
Applebaum, 54, served for seven months as interim mayor of Montreal before his arrest at his home in 2013 by corruption squad police for alleged crimes committed between 2006 and 2012 while he served as mayor of the city’s largest borough.
He had run on a platform of cleaning up city hall.
Applebaum’s conviction related to accepting kickbacks and favors from engineering firms and real estate developers in exchange for approval of projects.
Applebaum faced a maximum five-year sentence.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
