Netanyahu’s wife indicted on fraud charges in Israel

JERUSALEM — Sara Netanyahu, the wife of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, was indicted Thursday on charges that she improperly spent close to $100,000 of state money, using much of it to hire well-known chefs to cater private meals, while covering up that the prime minister’s residence already employed a fulltime cook.

Benjamin Netanyahu himself was not named in the indictment, though he is the subject of a handful of separate corruption investigations.

The charges announced against Sara Netanyahu include breach of trust, though she does not hold a formal public position, and cover 2010 through 2013. Accusing her of “exploiting her status as the wife of the prime minister,” prosecutors said Sara Netanyahu and a top aide colluded in a “planned, ongoing and systematic” scheme both to break government rules and to prevent state accountants from learning of her trespasses.

According to the indictment, “… the accused acted jointly to fund at the cost of the public coffers ready meals from restaurants, and this while simultaneously receiving the services of a full-time cook in the residence, who was falsely presented to the office as a cleaning worker …”

Sara Netanyahu and the aide, Ezra Saidoff, a manager in the prime minister’s office, are accused of falsifying household financial records, misidentifying kitchen staff members as maintenance workers and inflating the hours worked by hand-picked outside waiters to show a lower rate of pay that fell within state guidelines.

To keep the cost per person within the guidelines, the prosecutors say, Saidoff also padded the number of occasions and the number of people who attended.

“… on the basis of the demands of the accused [Sara Netanyahu] to employ chefs in the residence for the purpose of cooking meals they hosted privately and in order to fund the high cost of the meals, the accused [Saidoff] acted in such a way that the overall cost of these meals was divided into a larger number of portions than the number of portions actually provided, and sometimes ‘spread them out’ over a number of dates,” the charges said.

In a statement, lawyers for Sara Netanyahu called the indictment “absurd and delusional,” cast blame on a former household superintendent and said “the Netanyahu family did not consume most of the food,” which was eaten by other people, including guests and staff.

“But the biggest absurdity,” the statement asserts, is that the accounting procedure Sara Netanyahu is accused of violating was drafted especially for Benjamin Netanyahu just days before he took office in 2009 “by three officials without authority.”

“An indictment based on an illegal procedure cannot hold water,” the statement says.

The attorney general of Israel, Avichai Mandelblit, filed Thursday’s indictment over the objections of Sara Netanyahu’s lawyers.

This is not the first time that the expensive tastes of Sara Netanyahu, 59, have come back to haunt her husband.

In September, Mandelblit closed inquiries into allegations that she had used state funds to pay for outdoor furniture for the Netanyahus’ private home in Caesarea and improperly redeemed more than $1,000 in bottle deposits for cash. And gifts of jewelry to Sara Netanyahu are among hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes that the police, in February, accused her husband of accepting.