Netanyahu says wife’s indictment will ‘evaporate’

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday said the attorney general’s planned indictment of his wife Sara for fraud would “evaporate,” and blamed the incidents on a former employee.

In a Facebook post published hours after Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit announced that he would be serving an indictment against Sara Netanyahu pending a hearing, Netanyahu blamed the legal entanglement on Menny Naftali, who served as caretaker in the Prime Minister’s Residence for a period of two years.

Mandelblit said earlier Friday that he intends to indict the prime minister’s wife for fraud for allegedly diverting some NIS 360,000 ($102,000) of shekels in public funds for her own use, with the specific intention of avoiding payment of personal expenses over private meals ordered to the Prime Minister’s Residence.

“Expenditure over food ordered in disposable containers had remarkably inflated during the time when state witness Menny Naftali served as caretaker, and miraculously dropped when he left,” Netanyahu wrote in the post.

“Why did expenses grow precisely during these years? Who ate or has taken this huge number of containers and meals, that were enough to feed a soccer team? Certainly not the Netanyahu family,” Netanyahu wrote.

“You should understand, this is what the entire story against the prime minister’s wife is based on. They told us about the garden furniture, the electrician, the bottles, the waiters, the nanny – in the end all that’s left is the bizarre and false story of the [food] containers, most of which were ordered by Menny Naftali. This, too, will evaporate during the hearing,” he wrote.

The indictment, announced Friday, also names Ezra Saidoff, a former deputy director general of the Prime Minister’s Office, as a defendant in the case.

The indictments are pending hearings for both Netanyahu and Saidoff.

Also Friday, the Netanyahus’ attorney Yaakov Weinroth said Sara Netanyahu would not look for a plea deal in the case.

“I don’t think that there would be a plea bargain in this case, we will fight to prove her innocence,” he told Channel 2 news.

A statement from the Attorney General’s Office said that “the decision [to file the charges] was made after the attorney general examined the case material and after he heard the positions of the relevant sources, including the recommendations of the state prosecution and the Jerusalem district prosecution to consider pressing charges,”

The charges relate to the drawing of funds from state coffers for private meals ordered to the Prime Minister’s Residence.

According to the statement, Sara Netanyahu and Saidoff deliberately created the “false appearance” that there was no official chef working at the residence when in fact there was a full-time employee in the position. This was done in order to allow them to “sidestep the guidelines” by which, when there is no chef employed, the prime minister and his family are entitled to charge the state for food ordered to the residence.

“In this manner, they fraudulently received hundreds of meals from restaurants and outside chefs worth some NIS 359,000 ($102,000),” the statement said, adding that the specific charges being considered were for “fraud under serious circumstances and breach of trust.”

Naftali’s lawyer Daniel Haklai said he was “calling on Mrs. Netanyahu, her associates and the prime minister to cease the smear campaign against [Naftali] and to avoid disrupting the court’s proceedings, and to focus on the legal defense of Mrs. Netanyahu.”

“There is no escaping the serving of an indictment in a situation where personal expenses at hundreds of thousands of shekels are paid by the state, by the public and by the Israeli taxpayers. We will firmly withstand any attempt to pin these severe allegations on Menny Naftali who is an honest, brave and reliable man who dared expose some of this serious affair,” Haklai continued.

“Menny Naftali, for his part, will appear at the trial to testify truthfully as much as this is required of him,” Haklai said.