JERUSALEM — Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said on Friday he was resigning after being charged with fraud and breach of trust, in a move that could have repercussions on the upcoming general election.

"Though I know I committed no crime ... I have decided to resign my post as foreign minister and deputy prime minister," Lieberman said in a statement emailed to news organizations.

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He added that he hoped to clear his name "without delay."

Israel's Justice Ministry said Thursday it would charge Lieberman over alleged irregularities tied to the promotion of an Israeli diplomat who had leaked him privileged information about a police probe into his activities.

Other charges dropped
More serious allegations, including money-laundering and bribery, were dropped, but even the lesser charges cast a cloud over his political future.

Within 24 hours of receiving the ministry report, Lieberman decided to stand down.

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It was unclear if he would still run in the Jan. 22 general election, although Israeli newspapers have suggested he might be forced to sit on the sidelines as the judicial case moves ahead.

Lieberman's right-wing party Yisrael Beiteinu (Our Home is Israel) and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud group have formed an electoral pact ahead of the ballot and opinion polls had predicted they would win.

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Nationalistic rhetoric
An outspoken foreign minister and a powerful partner in the governing coalition, Lieberman is known for his nationalistic rhetoric, making it a key component of his election campaigning.

Without the Moldovan-born politician near the top of the bill, some pollsters have speculated that the combined group will see a slippage in support.

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An official in the prime minister's office told Reuters that Netanyahu would serve as acting foreign minister until the election.

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Updated at 11:40 a.m. ET: MILAN -- An Italian court on Friday convicted former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of tax evasion and sentenced him to four years in prison.

But the verdict did not mean that Berlusconi will go to prison anytime soon.

In Italy, cases must pass two levels of appeal before the verdicts are final. Berlusconi is expected to appeal. He will not have to serve any time in jail until his final appeal is heard.

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Still, the conviction Friday was significant because it was the media mogul's first prison sentence in years of criminal probes.

The verdict was almost certainly the final nail in the 76-year-old’s political coffin, two days after he announced he would not run for premier in upcoming elections.

Berlusconi was not in the courtroom for the verdict.

Berlusconi, along with other defendants convicted in the case, must deposit a total of €10 million ($13 million) into a court-ordered fund appeals, which could take years, proceed.

Berlusconi stepped down as prime minister last November after Italy came under mounting market pressure to deal with its high debt load and Berlusconi failed to come up with persuasive financial reforms.

Scheme involved rights to U.S. movies
Prosecutors alleged that the defendants were behind a scheme to purchase the rights to broadcast U.S. movies on Berlusconi's private TV networks in his Mediaset empire through a series of offshore companies and had falsely declared the payments to avoid taxes.

A total of 11 people were on trial.

Three were acquitted, including a close associate of Berlusconi, Fedele Confalonieri, chairman of Mediaset. Berlusconi and three others were convicted, including a Hollywood producer, Frank Agrama, who received a three-year sentence.

Four defendants were cleared because statute of limitations had run out.

Not the first Italian PM to be convicted
Berlusconi is not the first former Italian premier to be convicted of criminal charges.

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Former Socialist Premier Bettino Craxi eluded an arrest warrant and turned up at his villa in Tunisia in 1994 after a court in Italy charged him in a massive corruption case. He was tried in absentia, convicted and sentenced to 8 1/2 years in prison, never returned to Italy and died in exile. Craxi was considered Berlusconi's mentor thanks to his opening to private television in Italy from a state monopoly.

Former seven-time Christian Democrat premier, Giulio Andreotti, was convicted of involvement in a Mafia-murder. But he was cleared on appeal and never went to jail.

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In the same courthouse on Friday, another criminal trial against Berlusconi was held. He is charged in that case with paying for sex with an under-age teenager and trying to cover it up. He denies wrongdoing.

Berlusconi has been tried numerous times for his business dealings. He has always denied wrongdoing and alleged that the cases were politically motivated. In each case to date, he has been cleared or seen the statute of limitations expire.

NBC's Claudio Lavanga, The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

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A German fugitive sought for five years in a Florida-based fraud scheme that netted more than $100 million has been arrested in Las Vegas, authorities said Friday.

Ulrich Felix Anton Engler, 51, was arrested for being in violation of U.S. immigration law, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said.

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He is wanted on criminal charges filed in Mannheim and Hamburg, Germany, courts where he is accused of committing fraud on a repetitive and gainful basis, officials said in a prepared statement. If convicted, Engler faces up to 20 years in prison.

A fingerprint match from a Feb. 11, 2011, drunken driving case in which a Nevada Highway Patrol officer cited Engler, who may have used a different name at the time, helped U.S. Marshals track him down, The Associated Press reported.

“I hope Mr. Engler's victims in this case feel a measure of relief that Mr. Engler's fraud and long run are over and that he will soon face justice in Germany for his alleged crimes," said ICE Director John Morton.

The FBI and local police on Friday seized more than 1,000 pieces of artwork from a storage facility that Engler allegedly rented in Boulder City, about 25 miles east of Las Vegas.

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FBI Agent Patrick Turner in Las Vegas called the action an effort to recover proceeds on behalf of Engler's alleged victims.

Engler is accused of using a marketing company in Cape Coral, Fla., to build an Internet pyramid scheme. From June 2003 to December 2004, it collected almost $101 million from more than 3,500 investors in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, authorities said. Once the money reached the United States, investors lost access to it, they said.

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When the arrest warrant was issued in Germany, Engler was believed to have been living in Florida.

Last year, U.S. marshals and INTERPOL officials in Washington determined Engler was living in Nevada, where he was perpetuating his fraud schemes under a new identity, Joseph Miller, officials said.

He will be turned over to law enforcement officials in Germany, they said.

This article includes reporting by The Associated Press and NBC News' Jim Gold.

 

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LONDON -- British police fear a former oil executive has been abducted by a gang of fraudsters who have tried to sell her $1 million London apartment and may have forced her to hand over her bank codes, according to reports Thursday.

Detectives searching for Carole Waugh, 50, said that an unidentified man impersonating her brother had met people in her apartment in central London's upmarket Marylebone neighborhood in an apparent attempt to sell the property, The Times reported (site operates behind a paywall).

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Detective Chief Inspector John McFarlane also told Britain's Press Association that "very substantial amounts of money" had been stolen from Waugh's bank accounts.

Waugh, who has previously worked in the oil industry in London and Libya, has not been seen by family or friends since April, when they discussed a planned 50th birthday party for her in June. The case has been passed to the London Metropolitan Police's homicide and serious crimes division.

'Completely out of character'
McFarlane told the PA that financial activity linked to her identity has also grown "incrementally more suspicious." Police have released images of a man outside a supermarket in north London on July 10, where one of Waugh's ATM cards was used, the PA reported.

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"Ms. Waugh is a successful businesswoman and her disappearance is completely out of character," McFarlane said, according to the London Evening Standard.

"Following her disappearance, there have been a number of fraudulent transactions associated with Ms. Waugh's bank account. ... There are also a number of her personal possessions that cannot currently be located," the newspaper quoted him as saying.

Police officers told The Times that Waugh had been impersonated by at least three women at financial institutions across London. Earlier this week, two women, aged 48 and 50, were arrested on charges of conspiracy to defraud in connection with the case. The 48-year-old has been freed on bail, the newspaper said.

Three men and two other women have been arrested and bailed in connection with the case, reports said. A fourth man, named as 40-year-old Rakesh Bhayani, appeared in a London court via video link on Wednesday, The Times said.

Waugh's family, who are based in the north of England, said they did not know much about Carole Waugh’s life in London. She was able to work sporadically since moving to London in 2008 because she had been "very careful" with her money, her brother Chris, 53, told the PA.

Online dating link?
Waugh is single and police have been trying to trace men she may have met through dating sites, The Times said.

Chris Waugh told reporters that his sister had been planning a vacation in Las Vegas with her female friends. He appealed for his sister's friends, as well as any recent work colleagues, to come forward.

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"We are keen to track them down to see what was going on," the PA quoted him as saying. "If we could find the friends, just to see what light they can shine on [my] sister."

Chris Waugh said it was a "very distressing moment" when he heard someone was posing as him in a fraudulent attempt to sell his sister's apartment, according to the PA.

'Our imaginations have been running wild'
He said his family was "very proud" of his younger sister, who he described as "very focused, strong and driven," The London Evening Standard reported.

"The last time we saw Carole was at Easter when we all got together in (the northern English city of) Durham. We had a great time and we were all very excited about Carole's 50th birthday party in June. We were planning how we would celebrate and I was looking forward to making a fuss of her, as she did for my birthday," the newspaper quoted him as saying.

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"There was nothing to suggest she would go missing. It was all very strange and completely out of character because my sister rings my mother every other day and suddenly, within days of getting together at Easter, the phone calls just stopped," the Evening Standard quoted Waugh as saying.

Members of her family told The Guardian newspaper that it was highly unusual for Carole Waugh not to check in regularly by telephone.

"Our imaginations have been running wild. I've considered several options, she could have gone on a quick holiday but that became less likely as the time went, and because she would still have telephoned mother," Chris Waugh told The Guardian.

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Police in Italy on Tuesday arrested the head of the country’s biggest buffalo mozzarella cheese maker and seized assets worth 100 million euros ($123 million) on suspicion of links to organized crime.

Giuseppe Mandara, who once called himself the "Armani of Mozzarella" in an interview, is thought to have been linked to a Naples mafia clan, according to a report by European news agency Agence France-Presse.

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A report in Italy’s Il Denaro newspaper [link in Italian] said investigators believe Mandara received a bailout from the mafia when he was in financial trouble in the 1980s.

The Mandara Group is a major global exporter of buffalo mozzarella and is sold by large chains in Europe, Japan and the United States, AFP reported.

The investigation also includes charges of misleading consumers after the company was found to have mixed in cow milk with more expensive buffalo milk and labeled batches of ordinary provolone cheese as the more prestigious kind.

"We have seized the whole company," Paolo Di Napoli, an officer from the environmental protection arm of the Carabinieri police, told AFP.

Buffalo mozzarella sells in Italy for around 12 euros ($15) per kilo and can cost more than twice as much abroad, AFP said.

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LONDON -- A British businessman who has sold bomb-detecting equipment to at least 20 countries, including Iraq, will appear in a London court on Thursday to face fraud charges, BBC News reported.

Police with the Avon and Somerset Constabulary, in the southwest of England, told the BBC that Jim McCormick, 55, would face six charges including producing and supplying the devices knowing that they were designed or adapted for use in fraud.

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The British government banned the export of the handheld ADE-651 in 2010 as a result of a BBC investigation that showed the device did not work. McCormick had been on bail since 2010 while authorities examined the sale of the device, the BBC reported.

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McCormick was director of a Somerset-based company called ATSC.

The Iraqi government reportedly spent $85 million on the detectors, which were used at most Baghdad checkpoints.

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In addition to the ADE-651, the ADE-650 and the ADE-101 are named in the charges, the Guardian newspaper reported. 

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MEXICO CITY - Mexico's next president denied that his party had been involved in any form of intimidation during his party's campaign, in the wake of allegations by at least one observer that Sunday's elections were "perhaps the biggest operation of vote-buying and coercion in the country's history."

"I am totally, totally certain that the party acted within the law," Enrique Pena Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, told a journalist from BBC News on Wednesday.

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Leftist runner-up Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has refused to concede and demanded a new tally, alleging vote-buying and coercion by the PRI, whose seven decades of rule until it lost power in 2000 were marked by widespread allegations of vote-rigging.

Preliminary results of the presidential vote showed Pena Nieto had officially won more than 38 percent of the vote, 6.5 points clear of Lopez Obrador.

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Mexico's election officials on Wednesday recounted votes from more than half the polling booths in the presidential and congressional elections. 

While the PRI declared the vote had been fair, some observers said it most definitely had not been. 

"It was neither a clean nor fair election," Eduardo Huchim of the Civic Alliance, a group funded by the United Nations Development Program, told The Washington Post.

The vote-buying was bribery on a vast scale, Huchim, a former Mexican elections official, told the newspaper. "It was perhaps the biggest operation of vote-buying and coercion in the country's history," he said.

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Huchim said that the coercion his group alleged would not change the election's outcome.

Rush to grocery stores
Feeding suspicion of large-scale vote-buying were scenes of thousands of people rushing to grocery stores this week to redeem pre-paid gift cards they said the PRI had given them ahead of the election. Several told reporters they had been told to turn in a photocopy of their voter ID card in order to get the gift cards. 

"If they're giving me money, then who isn't going to love them?" an unnamed woman said in one video. "Five hundred pesos is a lot of money!”

(500 pesos = $37.50)

YouTube video allegedly showing women discussing having received supermarket cards from PRI

Under Mexican election law, giving voters gifts is not a crime unless the gift is conditioned on a certain vote or is meant to influence a vote. However, the cost of such gifts must be reported, and cannot exceed campaign spending limits. Violations are usually punished with fines, but generally aren't considered grounds for annulling an election. 

Shoppers nearly stripped some shelves at a Soriana store in the poor district of Iztapalapa and officials in Mexico City, which is governed by Lopez Obrador's Democratic Revolution, ordered at least one branch of the chain closed for alleged violation of safety codes.

Both the PRI and the supermarket company denied any irregularities. 

PRI spokesman Eduardo Sanchez said that "Neither the PRI's executive committee, nor Enrique Pena Nieto's campaign has contracted any service from the Soriana grocery store chain.

Asked if some other local or congressional PRI candidate could have done it on behalf of Pena Nieto, he said "I don't know."

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Humberto Fayad, a spokesman for the Soriana chain, denied the company had sold huge amounts of gift cards to the PRI.

"There is no agreement between the PRI and Soriana, or Soriana and any other political party. Soriana is a non-political company," Fayad said.

The PRI, too, accused rivals in many parts of the country of handing out groceries or using government programs to influence voters. 

The governing National Action Party accused Pena Nieto's campaign of acquiring about 9,500 prepaid gift cards worth nearly $5.2 million (71 million pesos) to give away for votes. Authorities said a business had bought that number of cards, but that they had found no direct evidence of vote-buying. That investigation continues. 

Party's checkered past challenges Mexico's president-elect 

Lopez Obrador had asked for a recount of every vote, but the electoral institute said that just over half the polling booths for the presidential race met the necessary conditions set out by a 2007 electoral law.

That law stipulates that a recount can only be requested at a polling station where there is a gap of less than 1 percentage point between the two leading candidates, or for other "inconsistencies" that could include hard-to-read ballots.

The final presidential numbers were due on Thursday.

In 2006, Lopez Obrador demanded a recount after losing to President Felipe Calderon by slightly more than half a percentage point, or some 250,000 votes. This time he finished more than 3 million votes behind Pena Nieto.

Electoral law did not permit a full recount in 2006 and his request was refused. Lopez Obrador then called out his supporters who launched street protests that choked Mexico City for weeks.

Msnbc.com staff, Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report. 

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India may have lost $210 billion in what one opposition politician described as the "mother of all scams," according to reports.

A draft report by government auditors estimated the sum was lost when state-owned coalfields were sold to private operators too cheaply because of a lack of competitive bidding.

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The draft from the Comptroller and Auditor General's (CAG) office, leaked and reported by the Times of India, criticized the allocation of 155 coalfields to about 100 private and some state-run firms between 2004 and 2009, questioning why they were not auctioned off to the highest bidder.

 

However, while the published excerpts criticized the government's methods, they stopped short of direct accusations of corruption and the auditor also later backed away from the loss calculation and said its thinking had changed.

Reuters reported that the revelations had provoked fury in India's parliament, where lawmakers are angry at a string of recent scandals and policy missteps by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

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Singh, who oversaw the coal ministry during some of the period covered by the report, made no comment during his appearance in parliament on Thursday but his office called the leaked report's estimated loss "exceedingly misleading."

Opposition party leader Prakash Javadekar described the coalfield sale as the "mother of all scams" and the government as "the government of looters" in comments reprinted in the Times of India.

Singh has lurched from crisis to crisis since massive corruption in the sale of telecoms spectrum surfaced two years ago, culminating in the quashing of licenses. The telecoms sale may have cost the government up to $36 billion.

The uncertainty over the coal contracts will add to investors' confusion about doing business in one of the world's fastest-growing economies.

Any suggestion of lost revenues also underlines the weakening state of the central government's finances. The budget deficit is expected to blow out to 5.9 percent of GDP this fiscal year from a goal of 4.6 percent, leaving the government financially stretched for the upcoming year and ahead of elections due by 2014.

Reuters and msnbc.com's Alastair Jamieson contributed to this report.