A fashion model, who once lived at the Hollywood home of Orson Welles with her mother, has been sentenced by a Serbian court to two years and 10 months in jail. Katarina Rebraca was ordered to repay $227,000 from the money she embezzled from a cancer charity that bore her name.
It took prosecutors eight years to win the conviction. Two of her associates, Slađana Mironija and Mirjana Hristić, each received one-year sentences from the High Court in Belgrade.
Prosecutors dropped charges against Rebraca’s mother, Sandrini Bogunović, who Serbian law enforcement had once accused of masterminding the scheme. Bogunović had worked as an assistant to Welles in his final months.
Between March 2006 to April 2010, Rebrača and her associates, embezzled 37 million dinars (roughly U.S. $336,000) from a charity established to educate women about breast cancer prevention.
The 45-year-old Rebrača, who was born in New York, spent part of her childhood with her mother residing at the Hollywood home Welles shared with his companion, Croatian actress Oja Kodar.
Bogunović, a personal assistant to Welles, was a witness on a hotly contested legal document during the 1986 court battle between Kodar and Welles’ widow, Italian countess Paola Mori.
Bogunović, who worked as an actress and later flight attendant, was deported from the U.S. years after Welles’ death for organizing the sale of pieces of art on transAtlantic flights. A participant in several other alleged scams, Bogunović is prohibited from entering the U.S., Austria, Germany and Sweden, according to Belgrade media reports.
Rebrača has denied that money from the humanitarian fund was used by for personal purposes. Rather, she blamed any malfeasance on the late Nenad Borojević, the former director of the Institute for Oncology and Radiology.
Borojević, who had been under investigation in an unrelated pharmaceutical scam, committed suicide in January 2012.
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