An indictment was filed Wednesday against the wife of Prime Minister Sara Netanyahu for the deliberate misappropriation of the mistake of another person who is not cheating on the dormitory affair. Netanyahu earlier signed a plea bargain in the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court and compensated the state with NIS 55,000 (approximately $12,000).
Sara Netanyahu will not have to plead guilty to defrauding the state, as she was accused of doing when the indictment was first filed in June 2018, nor will she stand trial after the case went through a six-month-long arbitration process.
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As part of the mediation process, it was agreed that the original indictment for the wife of the Prime Minister would be a fraud and breach of trust and that the amount of the meals that Netanyahu had received for the residence would be reduced by 50% to NIS 175,000.
In the arrangement, Sara Netanyahu will pay NIS 45,000 to finance her share of the meals she ordered and another NIS 10,000 for her conviction. Netanyahu was supposed to sign last night on the arrangement that was agreed upon – but the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court accepted her attorney’s request to postpone the signing date. The State Prosecutor’s Office refused to comment on the matter: “We will update it once the settlement is submitted to the court.”
Mani Naftali, the superintendent of the house who exposed the affair of the dormitories, is not satisfied with the plea bargain signed this morning by Sara Netanyahu. “She went out cheap,” he told the passerby angrily, “and it was not done in good faith.” Naftali, who is currently facing libel suits against people in Netanyahu’s vicinity, claims that “the State Prosecutor’s Office acted solely to calm the public, and the bottom line was that a civilian would not accept this deal.”
According to Naftali, who received the status of state witness in the affair, “I would have been satisfied only if she had returned to the state a lot more money, “The conclusion is that it is worth our country to be a thief and a criminal – these are the names that her lawyer, Yossi Cohen, called me.”
According to Naftali, signing the plea bargain today is not the end of the road in terms of this long-standing affair. “It is very possible that petitions against this arrangement will be filed with the High Court of Justice,” he says.
At the end of the month, Netanyahu signed a plea bargain with the State Prosecutor’s Office in the dormitory case, in which she was charged with four different counts. Deputy Prime Minister’s Office director general Ezra Sidov also reached a plea bargain that would include a suspended sentence and a fine of NIS 10,000.
Attorney General Avihai Mandelblit decided last year that the wife of the prime minister will be tried in the dormitories affair, subject to a hearing, in respect of four different offenses. The transfer items are the employment of a private electrician in the Prime Minister’s Residence and the transfer of payment to the State, the use of the Prime Minister’s Office for the care of her sick father and the purchase of garden furniture for the Prime Minister’s Residence.
According to suspicions, from the beginning of September 2010, at the latest, until March 2013, Netanyahu, together with Ezra Seidof, who served as the head of a senior department at the Prime Minister’s Office, And later as deputy director of operations and assets in the Prime Minister’s Office, to create a false impression that the prime minister’s official residence on Balfour Street in Jerusalem does not employ a brewery, although in practice they worked at a brewery.
The reason for the move, according to suspicions, is to circumvent the provisions of the procedure, in which it was determined, among other things, that “in a situation in which the worker is not employed in the official residence he will be able to order cooked food ready for the official residence …”
As a result of which the Ministry’s funding was used for the employment of breweries that cooked meals in the home and to order ready meals and to order chefs who cooked at the residence, thereby fraudulently receiving hundreds of meals from restaurants and funerals worth NIS 359,000.
