Sara Netanyahu trial to start July 19

The Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court President Avital Chen has set Sara Netanyahu’s fraud trial for July 19, in a decision issued on Tuesday.

The rapid start of the trial defied many expectations that the start date might be pushed until after the fall Jewish holidays in light of the upcoming July and August court recess.

Attorney-General Avichai Mandelblit filed an indictment last Thursday against the prime minister’s wife for fraud with aggravated circumstances and breach of public trust in an explosive development which shook the country.

Even though prime minister Yitzhak Rabin resigned from office in 1977 when his wife, Leah, was about to be indicted, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not considering such a move. Nevertheless, the indictment damages him politically in an atmosphere in which he himself is likely to face an indictment announcement in the coming months, or in early 2019.

The attorney-general alleged that from September 2010 until March 2013, Sara Netanyahu acted in coordination with then-Prime Minister’s Office deputy director-general Ezra Seidoff to present the false impression that the Prime Minister’s Residence did not employ a cook, even though it did during that time.

According to the indictment, the two made this misrepresentation to circumvent and exploit regulations that state: “In a case where a cook is not employed in the official residence, it is permitted to order prepared food as needed.” The two hoped to obtain state funding both for the cook at the residence and for prepared food orders. In this way, the pair allegedly fraudulently obtained NIS 359,000 from the state for hundreds of prepared food orders.

The indictment states that Mrs. Netanyahu regularly pressured Seidoff, house managers and others to obtain items for the residence whether they were authorized to do so by law or not. As a result of these pressures, Seidoff procured the unauthorized prepared food and other items, despite earlier attempts to explain to her that there was no basis for the state to pay for them. Also, Sara Netanyahu ordered Seidoff, Naftali and other workers not to reveal the fraud to others.

Furthermore, in 15 instances, invoices to outside chefs were falsified in order to circumvent limits on payments to them. Seidoff directed the chefs, the house managers and Mrs. Netanyahu’s secretaries to falsify the invoices on these occassions.

Charges against Mrs. Netanyahu for these incidents were previously closed by Mandelblit because of insufficient evidence to prove that she knew about Seidoff’s and the others’ actions.

The prosecution also indicted Seidoff last Thursday for the same offenses, adding the charge of falsifying documents, with a total fraud amount of NIS 393,000.

Several other cases against Mrs. Netanyahu were closed in September 2017, but one of them will also impact this indictment.

In that affair, she employed “S” and “G” for six days and five days respectively to care for her sick father, who is now deceased. While normally her father had a different homecare arrangement, during those days he was staying at the Prime Minister’s Residence when his regular arrangement was unavailable.

Netanyahu paid S for taking care of her father. However, in addition, S was paid by the state for providing cleaning services. G functioned as a substitute for S when S was unavailable. G was also paid by the state for cleaning services.

Mandelblit said that since Mrs. Netanyahu had paid S, was unaware of extra payments to S and that all of the state payments to S and G were small, he would not indict her – but that Mrs. Netanyahu’s pattern of problematic conduct in that case would serve as evidence in the “Prepared Food Affair.”

While Sara Netanyahu was only indicted in the food affair, Seidoff was also indicted in another case, in which the Prime Minister’s Residence in Jerusalem employed waiters over the weekend based on false misrepresentations, and for employing Avi Fahima for electrical work at the residence despite knowing that employing him had been declared an illegal conflict of interest.

Responding to the charges, Mrs. Netanyahu’s lawyer Yossi Cohen called the indictment “ridiculous and bizarre.”

Cohen called the limitations on expenditures for the Prime Minister’s Residence unconstitutional as they were passed by regulation and not by a Knesset law. Moreover, he said Mrs. Netanyahu was not aware of the regulation so there was no criminal intent.

He said that Meni Naftali and other residence managers like him, not Sara Netanyahu, were responsible for the food orders for which she is being accused.

In the past, Cohen has said that Mrs. Netanyahu’s defenses regarding food orders made in 2010 and 2013, when Naftali was not at the Prime Minister’s Residence, were that those accusations related only to around NIS 134,000.

Naftali has already admitted to criminal wrongdoing, so it is just a question of whether the court buys his story or Sara’s about whether she was involved. The 2011-2012 period in which he was house manager accounts for around NIS 225,000 of the charges.

Cohen has further said that the amount could easily be reduced to NIS 30,000-40,000, because many times when prepared food was ordered the staff cook was sick, traveling or off for Shabbat. He also said that some of the expenses were legitimate for hosting diplomats and dignitaries.

Asked if he could prove this argument, Cohen said it is known that the cook was off work for these reasons, and that all he needs to do is raise doubt and force the state to prove that the cook was in fact working at the time. Since he said the state has no way to prove, for example, that the cook was working when around NIS 15,000 was charged for prepared food in January 2011, it cannot prove that Netanyahu or anyone else improperly ordered prepared food.

Cohen has said that if the charges only related to NIS 30,000-NIS 40,000 at most, they could be dropped as relating to an oversight.

Mandelblit believes he has ample evidence to overcome these arguments and did not deduct one shekel from the indictment from his original announcement in September, despite having seen Cohen’s counter-evidence.