Top Blue and White candidate suggests ‘treason’ by Netanyahu in submarine case
Blue and White campaign event 18 March 2019
Michael Bachner writes in Times of Israel:
Moshe Ya’alon, a senior candidate on the Blue and White slate who once served as defense minister under Benjamin Netanyahu, on Wednesday said the prime minister’s actions in a corruption case involving submarine purchases could amount to “treason,” drawing rebuke from the Likud party.
Netanyahu’s election rivals have launched an all-out offensive over fresh allegations that he may have earned millions of shekels from the so-called submarine affair, calling it “the greatest security-related corruption case in the history of the State of Israel.”
The high-profile Case 3000 investigation has snared several close associates of Netanyahu, but not the premier himself, on suspicion that they received illicit funds as part of a massive graft scheme in the multi-billion-shekel state purchase of naval vessels from German shipbuilder Thyssenkrupp.
According to a Channel 13 news report last week, the State Comptroller’s Office has discovered that Netanyahu was once a shareholder in a company that supplies German shipbuilder Thyssenkrupp, which has built submarines for Israel.
Netanyahu has called allegations of impropriety on his part “contrived slander,” saying he “didn’t get a shekel from the submarine deal” and that the matter was “checked extensively by the prosecution and the attorney general, who stated unequivocally that I am not suspected of anything.”