Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Wednesday corruption trial testimony centered on allegations that Communications Ministry officials, on behalf of the Israeli leader, enacted policies to benefit Bezeq owner and co-defendant Shaul Elovitch, with Netanyahu charging that the investigators had manipulated the officials to bolster their accusations of a media bribery scheme.
Defense Attorney Amit Hadad said then-Communications Ministry chief of staff Eitan Tzafrir was fundamental to the prosecution’s theory that Netanyahu had advanced telecommunications policies like administrative approval or a 2015 Bezeq-Yes merger in return for positive news coverage yet had not called on him to testify.
Netanyahu said Tzafrir was not summoned as a star witness because investigators never thought the legal process would reach the point of a trial but rather that the allegations would be resolved in a plea deal.
Judge Moshe Bar-Am and the prosecution challenged Hadad to invite Tzafrir himself to examine him before the court.
The prime minister said he wasn’t aware of meetings between ex-Yes CEO Ron Eilon and Tzafrir related to the merger, nor had he ordered the chief of staff to approve the deal to satisfy Elovitch.
He also testified that he did not know of or order two meetings by aide David Sharan and former Bezeq VP Amikam Shorer. Hadad argued that the meetings were due to their friendship, not a bribery scheme.
The defense attorney also argued that Sharan’s 2018 interrogation by investigators had indicated that Netanyahu had made no orders regarding the merger. The prime minister said investigators didn’t confront him with statements by Sharan, former Communications Ministry director-general Shlomo Filber, and other witnesses because he would have set the matter straight. Investigators distorted testimonies and blackmailed witnesses to make their allegations, said the Israeli leader.
The hearing ended early with a final point by Hadad that the Prime Minister’s Office had issued a missive on the need for telecommunications policy reform that would ostensibly harm the business interests of former Walla- and- Bezeq-owner Shaul Elovitch. Netanyahu said no one had called him or pressed him not to pursue the reforms, including his co-defendant Elovitch.
“We broke the monopoly of Bezeq,” Netanyahu argued earlier in the day. He said he was only interested in breaking up media monopolies to benefit the country’s democracy.
The judges’ patience continued to fray as Hadad continued to go through the 315 items of the indictment rather than group them by kind for the prime minister to review. Judge Rivkah Friedman-Feldman repeatedly pressed Hadad to hurry or remarked that Walla articles that didn’t mention Netanyahu could have been presented together.
Hadad presented Walla articles critical of Netanyahu to discredit the idea that the prime minister had received positive coverage due to a deal with ex-Walla owner Elovitch. This included a series of articles regarding the controversy surrounding the use of public funds for the renovations of the Prime Minister’s Residence.
One article was about an electrician who was a Likud Party member and was working on the home at the time, with Netanyahu remarking that the electrician’s only fault was being affiliated with his political party – much in the same way he had been persecuted with the prosecution.
Guilt by association
It was “guilt by association,” said Netanyahu.
Following Monday’s closed deliberation about the cancellation of Tuesday’s hearing and the possibility of shifting to a two-testimony-a-week schedule, the prosecution on Tuesday requested that meeting’s minutes be made public. The judges ruled that the minutes would be provided to both parties and that the defense had until next Tuesday to file an explanation why they should not be made public.
The defense also has until Thursday to present its proposal for a new Netanyahu testimony schedule.