Who is Spencer Partrich?
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is known for making friends with billionaires around the world, and Spencer Partrich has become particularly close to him in recent years.
He is part of the Jewish community of Detroit and a major supporter of the Friends of the IDF. He co-owns Lautrec Ltd., a Farmington Hills, Michigan-based real estate management and development firm that is known for working with mobile home parks.
They met in 2000, when the prime minister was not a politician, through a mutual friend, the late doctor Eliezer Rachlemevich.
“They have a mutual appreciation for each other and truly enjoy each other’s company,” a source
close to Netanyahu said. “They get together whenever they can. Their families are friends.”
Netanyahu’s associates said the fact that they met when he was not a politician proved that the wealth-power connection Attorney-General Avichai Mandelblit referred to did not apply.
The so-called “Bibitours” scandal revealed that Partrich airlifted Netanyahu and his family around North America on his private jet, which was investigated by the then-attorney-general, who closed the case. In the affair, Partridge was nicknamed the prime minister’s “air taxi” in the US.
Partrich bought half of Netanyahu’s parents’ home from his brother Ido for NIS 8.4 million, according to a 2016 report by Haaretz. He was later investigated in the probe of Case 1000. In the case, he had confessed to buying Netanyahu suits valued at thousands of shekels, but that later, Netanyahu’s cousin and businessman Nathan Milikowsky returned the money to him.
In a scandal, after an October 2014 speech to the UN General Assembly, Netanyahu hosted him and other billionaires at New York’s Chart House, a seafood restaurant offering crabs, calamari and shrimp. •