Police arrest officials in Rehovot, Ashkelon amid multi-city graft probe

The Israel Police arrested three senior officials from the Rehovot and Ashkelon municipalities on Tuesday, suspecting them of taking bribes in return for securing lucrative sanitation projects, amid a multi-city probe that has netted over a dozen suspects.

The move marked an expansion of an investigation into suspicions of a similar scam at Tel Aviv’s city hall that led to the arrest of 13 people last month. Developments in that case brought investigators to suspect wrongdoing in Rehovot and the port city of Ashkelon as well.

The three new suspects would be facing a remand hearing at the Rishon Lezion Magistrate’s Court later in the day if needed, police said. They are suspected of bribery, fraud, tax offenses and money laundering.

In addition to the arrests, two department managers from Rehovot and Ashkelon were detained for questioning.

The case is being handled by the top-tier Lahav 433 national crime squad and by tax authorities, police said.

The Rehovot Municipality, in a statement to the media, only said the matter was being investigated by police. There was no immediate response from Ashkelon.

Two weeks ago, police said that 13 suspects had been arrested in the probe, including employees in the Tel Aviv sanitation department.

Police suspect that workers in companies providing cleaning services for the city’s sanitation department provided benefits, including bribes, to city employees in return for their assistance in securing municipal contracts.

The companies are also suspected of producing false or inflated invoices enabling them to pocket tens of millions of shekels. The affair involves Jewish and Arab crime families, police have said.

As that case progressed, investigators suspected that employees at the Rehovot and Ashkelon municipalities were involved in similar schemes.

Among those arrested so far is the deputy director of the Tel Aviv sanitation department, Shalom Ben-David.

The Tel Aviv Municipality said at the time of the arrests that it “trusts the police to do their job faithfully and bring the truth to light. The municipality will cooperate with the police as much as necessary.”

Ben-David was previously arrested in 2012, when he held the same position at the municipality, on suspicion that he cooperated with crime families to provide them inside information from city hall. No charges were made and the case was closed, after which Ben-David continued in his role.

When the 13 arrests were announced, a police and municipal official both wondered, speaking with Channel 12 news, how the Tel Aviv Municipality could have allowed the alleged corruption to happen after the previous 2012 incident.

“How did it not turn on a red light among the senior officials of the municipality that criminal organizations managed to get a foot in?” said a police official, speaking anonymously.

“Where is the audit system in the municipality that should have prevented the leakage of hundreds of millions of shekels to criminal organizations and their associates?”

A city hall official, also speaking anonymously, said: “Already back then [in 2012], they should have done a comprehensive in-house inspection in the department of sanitation to thoroughly check the suspicions of the police, but unfortunately this did not happen.”

In 2023, over a dozen mayors and officials from municipalities in the north of the country were arrested on suspicion of involvement in bribes to secure garbage collection contracts.