Indictments filed in Ronel Fisher affair

Ruth David and Ronel Fisher
Ruth David and Ronel Fisher

The State Attorney's Office filed an indictment against retired police superintendent Eran Malka, Adv. Ruth Blum-David, and others.

This afternoon, the police investigations department at the State Attorney's Office filed an indictment in the Jerusalem District Court against Adv. Ronel Fisher, retired police superintendent Eran Malka, Adv. Ruth Blum-David (a former Tel Aviv District Attorney), Yair Biton (a contractor), Shai Baras (an architect and CEO of Netivei Israel - National Transport Infrastructure Company Ltd.), Yosef Nahamias, and Aviv Nahamias (both contractors).

The accused are charged with taking and giving bribes, fraud and breach of trust, fraudulent receiving in aggravated circumstances, money laundering, obstruction of justice, each according to his or her role in the corruption affair.

Adv. Blum-David is accused of obstructing justice in relation to two affairs and also of receiving assets obtained through crime. The charges against her were approved by Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein, who has been closely monitoring the way the affair and its ramifications have been dealt with.

It emerges from the indictments that in the past few years there allegedly operated in Israel a criminal network reaching into organs of law enforcement that traded in "criminal investigation products".

In this line of products is "closure of an investigation", and the best-selling "information from an investigation", that it turns out can be bought for the right money. A sub-affair is shortly expected to break, in which the opening of an investigation was also bought.

The main salesman for these police services, it is alleged, is Adv. Ronel Fisher, owner of a well-known legal firm and a television star, with extensive connections in the police, the Ministry of Justice, and the press and media.

The manufacturer of these products, according to the indictment, is retired police superintendent Eran Malka, a senior officer in the Lahav 433 national fraud unit in the Israel Police, who was able to create an investigation out of nothing, pass on information from an investigation, and also make an investigation come to nothing.

The indictment also indicates that after their doings started to be exposed, Fisher and Malka acted determinedly to disrupt their own investigation at the police investigations department, and even succeeded at an early stage, partially but effectively, in doing so, to the extent that for several months the investigation was in a dead end, eventually broken through when investigators managed to hack into the mobile telephones of Malka and the state's witness.

Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on May 14, 2015

© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd. 2015

Ruth David and Ronel Fisher
Ruth David and Ronel Fisher
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