Suspended sentence for professor who demanded kickbacks from students

A court has sentenced a university professor to 17 months' imprisonment, suspended for three years, after finding him guilty of attempting to extort his students.

According to the indictment, the professor had demanded that researchers participating in university programs that he supervised hand over a part of their monthly research grants.

Typically, he told his PhD students and postgraduates that if they did not pay a kickback of 300-400 euros from their research grants, he would block subsequent payments or remove them from the programs.

"He threatened to intervene to have four monthly payments returned if I did not pay him 300 euros out of my 720-euro grant," one of the complainants said.

In his defense, the professor said that he had told his students and researchers that if they did no work, they would have to return their grants.