The Knesset today published a tender for offers from accountants and law firms for investigative and legal consultant services for purposes of tracing bank accounts in Israel belonging to Jews who perished in the Holocaust.
The Parliamentary Inquiry Committee for the Location and Restitution of Property of Holocaust Victims, headed by MK Colette Avital (Labor-Meimad), decided to launch an independent external investigation to trace the assets and restore them to their owners or the legal heirs. The investigation will be based on a statement of principles signed three months ago between the banks and the Knesset.
The investigation will encompass all bank documents, accounts, and safe deposit boxes, in order to assess the extent and current value of the assets, and will recommend transferring assets without owners to the Custodian General or the Ministry of Finance.
The investigation will include all the banks’ computerized databases and archives and will be conducted under the guidance of an advisory committee, which set the tender conditions. The advisory committee will report to the Inquiry Committee on the progress of the investigation.
According to the tender, the actual investigation will be conducted by accountants under the supervision of lawyers. The tender defines the subject of the investigation as, “Account data for the purpose of tracing Holocaust victims’ bank accounts; financial aspects of the accounts, including preserving the value of the money, commissions charged, transfer of funds and property to other parties in Israel and overseas, including the Custodian General and the Ministry of Finance; banking operations required by law for tracing relatives of account holders who died in the Holocaust and transferring the funds to them; and the banks’ method of handling applications by heirs.”
Payment under the tender is NIS 151 per hour, plus VAT. The rate is very low and matches the low rate stipulated by the Government Companies Authority. A previous examination by “Globes” showed that the large accounting firms are likely to take an interest if the amount of work involved amounts to hundreds of thousands of hours. At the same time, in view of the high tech crisis and the recession, such work is likely to prove more attractive, especially considering the accompanying publicity.
It should be noted that according to a “Globes” investigation, the British Custodian of Enemy Property probably obtained the money deposited in the banks - mostly Bank Leumi and, to a lesser extent, Discount Bank – by Holocaust victims during WWII. After the State was established, these funds were transferred to the Custodian General.
At the same time, research by Prof. Yossi Katz showed that in the 1950s, Israeli government sources asserted that significant funds remained in the hands of the banks. The contradiction between the archive sources in Israel relied on by Katz and the British sources used by “Globes” has not yet been resolved.
Published by Israel's Business Arena on July 12, 2001