How the attempt to hide PM’s alleged graft apparently gave it away
A December 2016 bid to coordinate stories of chief suspects Netanyahu and Elovitch may have produced the state’s witnesses who turned on them
The final recommendation submitted by police investigators on Sunday in the so-called Case 4000 graft investigation of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has brought a confused and complex case into stark focus.
In the non-binding summary, investigators say Netanyahu advanced regulatory decisions benefiting Shaul Elovitch, the controlling shareholder in Bezeq, the country’s largest telecommunications firm — despite opposition from Communication Ministry officials — in exchange for positive coverage from Elovitch’s Walla news site.
In a blistering accusation, police said “the prime minister and his associates intervened in a blatant and ongoing manner, and sometimes even daily, in the content published by the Walla News website, and also sought to influence the appointment of senior officials (editors and reporters) via their contacts with Shaul and Iris Elovitch,” the Bezeq owner’s wife.
Investigators say they believe there is enough evidence to bring Netanyahu to trial on charges of accepting bribes, fraud and breach of trust, and fraudulently accepting benefits. The attorney general will make the final decision on whether to press charges.
Investigators pinpoint two key moments in the development of Case 4000 that helped ensnare some of its key state’s witnesses, and in the end led to a scathing report against a sitting prime minister.
In late December 2016, media reports surfaced of two quiet police probes underway into graft suspicions surrounding Netanyahu.
The reports led one of Netanyahu’s closest confidants, then-media adviser Nir Hefetz, to seek an urgent face-to-face meeting with Bezeq owner Elovitch.
The two met on December 27, 2016, together with Ilan Yeshua, the CEO of the Elovitch-owned Walla news site, at Elovitch’s northern Tel Aviv home, according to a recapping of the events in the Haaretz daily, citing police sources and the police document released on Sunday.
According to messages exchanged that day between Elovitch and Yeshua, Hefetz had told Elovitch that the prime minister’s staff believed the two investigations concerned Elovitch and Netanyahu’s relationship with Australian billionaire James Packer. Hefetz was, police say, desperate to do something about the Elovitch investigation he believed was underway.
The meeting, as described by investigators, turned into one of the most compromising moments in the careers of the prime minister, the telecom tycoon, and their underlings.
During the meeting, Hefetz allegedly asked to coordinate an agreed-upon version of events in case police were looking into the possibility — as the Case 4000 indictment alleges — that Netanyahu had granted vast regulatory benefits to Bezeq in exchange for overwhelmingly positive coverage in Walla. Those benefits included restricting competition in the Israeli ground-line phone market, among other decisions taken by Netanyahu in the years he served as communications minister.
In the version proposed by Hefetz, any pro-Netanyahu tilt at Walla during these years would be pinned on Yeshua, who would testify that he supported Netanyahu and sought to have that reflected in Walla’s coverage.
As if to emphasize the obstruction of justice that was allegedly underway, Hefetz demanded that all concerned destroy any evidence of coordination of both Walla’s news coverage as well as of the attempts to synchronize their stories.
Elovitch then turned to Yeshua and demanded he destroy his iPhone. Yeshua “understood he was entering very dangerous territory,” a law enforcement source told Haaretz. He begged off, saying the phone contained precious photos of his family he wished to back up to his computer. He vowed to destroy it later, when he got home.
He never did.
The next day, a source told the daily, Yeshua went to an attorney, related the events of the day before, and had his story written down by the lawyer for future use as testimony.
The irony of that evening meeting in December 2016 must haunt the suspects named in the police recommendations on Sunday, including Netanyahu and his wife Sara, and Elovitch and his wife Iris. The two investigations underway at the time involved gifts Netanyahu received from Arnon Milchan and James Packer, and Netanyahu’s alleged attempt to establish another quid-pro-quo agreement with Yedioth Aharonoth publisher Arnon Mozes, in which he offered to push through a law that would weaken rival daily Yisrael Hayom in exchange for more positive coverage in Yedioth.
The investigations never came close to connecting Netanyahu and Elovitch, but the overreaction by the two sides and the alleged efforts at obstruction would produce the paper trail that gave police the leverage to convince both Yeshua and Hefetz, as well as other officials, to turn state’s witnesses, bringing their testimony and mountains of evidence — including Yeshua’s written testimony from December 28, 2016, as well as his phone — into investigators’ hands.
A year after that tense meeting, in December 2017, as part of his testimony in a separate graft case over allegations Elovitch had defrauded investors, Yeshua would hand his phone over to police, knowing full well what it contained and, say investigators, with great relief at being rid of it. That act launched what is today known as Case 4000.
In hundreds of messages and recorded calls contained on the device, investigators found Elovitch allegedly instructing Walla management to help Netanyahu, who was “doing this all for me,” according to quotes from the material published by Haaretz.
“I have to repay him,” Elovitch says explicitly in one text message to Yeshua.
Fast-forward another year, to December 2, 2018, and those two incidents, the original attempt to allegedly obstruct, and, a year later, Yeshua’s coming clean to investigators, form the backbone of a police recommendation document that may be the most serious threat to Netanyahu’s political future thus far.
