The State Attorney and billionaire Lev Leviev have reached a plea bargain agreement in the "black diamond" affair. The plea bargain is due to be signed today, and an indictment will be filed against LLD Diamonds Ltd., a company owned by Leviev, and against its CEO Reuven Shmuelov. The case against the other suspects, headed by Leviev himself and his son Zvulun, will be closed.
Leviev flew to Israel on Tuesday night, and, by arrangement, was met at the airport by officers of the police Lahav 433 fraud unit, who informed him that he was being detained for questioning.
The "black diamond" affair is a case that has been under investigation by the Israel Police and the Israel Tax Authority since 2018. The allegation is that LLD smuggled diamonds worth huge sums into Israel.
Leviev has been living abroad for fear of being arrested in Israel. Negotiations have taken place over the years with his attorneys, Eitan Maoz and Giora Aderet, with a view to Leviev presenting himself for questioning, but the Sate Attorney’s Office refused, as a matter of policy, to undertake in advance that he would not be arrested on landing in Israel. Because of this, Leviev refrained from traveling to Israel, even for close family events.
It now appears that the State Attorney’s Office has come to the realization that there is no point in continuing to wait for Leviev to turn up without preconditions, and that it was preferable in the special circumstances of the case to sign a plea bargain that would leave Leviev’s name off the indictment.
According to the information that has reached "Globes", LLD will pay a fine in the millions of shekels as part of the plea bargain. The State Attorney’s Office refused to comment on the substance of the matter, and only stated in response to the report, "Following enquiries by reporters, we would make clear that Mr. Leviev informed the enforcement authorities of the date of his return to Israel, and that before his return it was made clear to him that the question of his arrest or the conditions for his release would be considered by the police in accordance with developments in the investigation."
In 2018, when the investigation was opened, Superintendent Gal Chesner, representing Israel Police, said at a hearing for extending the suspects’ remand, "LLD behaves as a crime organization, using diamond carriers who smuggle diamonds like the worst of drug smugglers. The company falsifies and destroys evidence."
Diamonds worth some NIS 300 million are alleged to have been smuggled from Russia to Israel between 2002 and 2018. It now appears that the affair, which began with a great deal of noise, is ending, as many such cases have ended in the past, somewhat less resonantly.
The case began in 2018, when customs officers at Ben Gurion Airport detained a person they had marked down as suspected of attempting to bring merchandise into Israel without reporting it. They did not, however, foresee the chain of events that would be set off by checking him. In the course of the search made of his belongings and his body it was discovered that he had concealed on his body a valuable diamond, worth about NIS 1 million, that he was suspected of having smuggled from one of the former Soviet Union countries. In the wake of this, the Israel Police and the Israel Tax Authority formed a joint investigation team.
In November 2018, after six months of covert investigations in the diamond industry, tracking of suspects exiting and entering Israel, and trips overseas by investigators following diamond merchants and the diamonds they concealed, the investigators arrested suspects in the affair on charges of involvement in diamond smuggling, money laundering, customs offences, income tax offences, conspiracy to commit a crime, fraudulent receiving, false accounting, and other offences.
A tragic event took place in the course of the investigation when Mazal Hadadi, a bookkeeper for LLD Diamonds, jumped to her death from the 10th floor of an office building next to the Diamond Exchange in Ramat Gan. It turned out that she was not suspected of any criminal activity.
A statement on Lev Leviev’s behalf said, "Mr. Leviev came to Lahav 433 headquarters and in questioning conveyed his consistent version of events according to which he was at no stage involved in smuggling diamonds. Mr. Leviev will return to his family tonight and will come back to Israel in the coming weeks."
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on September 22, 2022.
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