State Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss states in his report on the Investment Promotion Center affair that the conduct of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert raises suspicion of dishonesty. Lindenstrauss has sent the report to Attorney General Menachem (Meni) Mazuz.
The report covers benefits given to YY Silicate Block Ltd. in Dimona, which was represented by a close friend of Olmert, Adv. Uri Messer, the husband of Deputy Attorney General Davida Lahman-Messer. The report found that Olmert, when he was minister of industry, trade and labor, intervened on behalf of the company and helped it to obtain various benefits amounting to millions of dollars. The ministry’s professional staff opposed aiding the company.
Lindenstrauss said that Olmert should have refrained from discussing the matter because the company was represented by Messer. Lindenstrauss believes that Olmert’s involvement in the cases constituted a severe conflict of interest.
The report found that, “Pressures applied by the minister and his advisors to expedite procedures, their repeated approaches to the staff of the Investment Center and development areas, their direction of the way the matter was dealt with, and their involvement in the details of the benefits and their amounts given to the entrepreneur, together amounted to more than minor activity on behalf of the entrepreneur.”
In response to the report, Olmert said today, “The prime minister has lost his confidence in the state comptroller, and therefore had no expectations from him in this matter, too. The conduct of the comptroller in the matter of the Investment Center report, in addition to his conduct in other reports, has once again regrettably broken all records of non-professionalism and bias in the comptroller’s work. This conduct has brought this prestigious and important institution, which he heads, to a low point, which many in the civil service, his predecessors in the post, and former and current senior officials in the Office of the State Comptroller regret.
“We have no doubt that this so-called affair, like the other affairs examined by the comptroller, will end with nothing, and disperse like sea froth.”
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes.co.il - on April 25, 2007
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