Netanyahu’s Corruption Trial Delayed For Another Week
The current delay is because of the disagreement between the defense and the prosecution on how to handle the cell information extracted from the Ilan Yeshua, former CEO of Walla.
On July 5, the Jerusalem District Court ordered a week’s delay in the hearings of the corruption case pertaining to the former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This decision comes after the hearings supposed to be held on June 16, were postponed for 3 weeks.
The current delay is because of the disagreement between the defense and the prosecution on how to handle the cell information extracted from the Ilan Yeshua, former CEO of Walla (the media company involved in the corruption scandals involving Netanyahu).
This delay means that the case is not likely to progress at full pace until October 2021 due to the six-week legal break starting from July 21 until September 1 followed by Jewish High Holidays in September.
This delay pertains to case 4000 – the Bezeq-Walla Bribery Affair – in which Netanyahu allegedly (mis)used his powers to provide favors to Bezeq in the telecommunications policy in exchange for positive media coverage on Walla news website. The prosecution claimed that Shaul Elovitch, the owner of Bezeq and Walla, was directly involved in discussions with the Prime Minister on the new communication policy adopted by the Ministry at that time. Elovitch is also the co-defendant in this case.
The prosecution has claimed that the text messages between Ilan Yeshua and Netanyahu’s messengers or Elovitch and the messages Yeshua sent other parties were not examined thoroughly for which they need more time. However, the defense believes that this search will reveal that not only Netanyahu but other politicians were also given special coverage by the news website. This might level the corruption charges.
The prosecution argued that it will not help Netanyahu’s case since he used government resources to pay for the biased coverage. The defense, on the other hand, accused the prosecution of not transferring all the relevant evidence. This prosecution claimed that it did not transfer around 150,000 lines of content as it might lead to a huge breach of privacy of individuals not relevant to the case. This implies that the examination of this new evidence will further delay the case until October.
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