Frenchman testified he gave Netanyahu $200,000 in 2009

The alleged French Jewish fraudster Arnaud Mimran told investigators in 2015 that he had given Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu $200,000 in 2009, when he was running for the premiership.

The admission to French authorities runs contrary to the prime minister’s version of events, as well as to a statement Mimran himself made last month, claiming he donated $40,000 to Netanyahu in 2001, when he wasn’t in office.

Asked about an Israeli who is one of the key characters in the graft case for which he is being prosecuted in France, Mimran said, “I met him for the first time in Israel at the beginning of 2009. I would travel there a lot at the time, because it was the time of elections, and I was close to Netanyahu, to whom I donated $200,000,” according to a Haaretz report Wednesday.

If Mimran’s claim to police is true, that would have violated Israel’s campaign financing law, the report noted. According to the law, it is illegal to raise more than NIS 11,480 (some $3,000 or 2,642 euros) from a single donor for a Knesset run and more than NIS 45,880 (some $12,000 or 10,500 euros) for a primary campaign.

The report said that Mimran flew to Israel twice in February 2009, and was in the country during the elections, which Netanyahu won.

In June, Mimran flip-flopped in his account of the money he gave the prime minister. First he said he had given Netanyahu a million euros in 2009, when he was running for prime minister, to fund his election campaign. Netanyahu denied that account, asserting that the contribution was made in 2001, amounted to the much smaller sum of $40,000, and funded public diplomacy efforts rather than a personal campaign.

Mimran then revised his own account, contradicting Netanyahu and saying he gave him almost $200,000. He then backtracked, saying the prime minister had the numbers right and he had been wrong.

“Everything that Bibi says is true,” Mimran told Channel 2 at the time. “It’s possible that I got the numbers wrong because it’s been more than 10 years.”

“It was a long time ago, so it’s possible I made a mistake with the sum,” he said. “In any event, there was nothing illegal on Bibi’s part. I transferred a sum to him and invited him to vacations in Monaco and a ski resort in the French Alps.”

He said that, all told, it added up to 150,000 euros, or a million French francs.

Israel Police launched a probe to investigate the allegations against Netanyahu last month, per the attorney general’s instruction, Channel 2 reported.

Mimran is accused of being involved in a scheme that involved fraudsters buying carbon credits in EU countries where no value added tax was charged, and reselling them in France while charging 19.6 percent VAT but never remitting that tax money to the government.

The prosecutor in the case has requested a 10-year sentence for Mimran as well as the the seizure of 283 million euros of assets from Mimran and the other 11 defendants, five of whom are reported to have fled to Israel under the Law of Return — which grants citizenship to individuals of Jewish ancestry — and who did not present themselves at their trial.