A-G Weinstein shelves bribery investigation into former PM Barak

The police had said they found no evidence to support the allegations, including in certain “secret” tapes of various Barak conversations discovered in a Defense Ministry safe.

By YONAH JEREMY BOB
Former prime minister Ehud Olmert (L) shakes hands with his defense minister, Ehud Barak (photo credit: REUTERS)
Former prime minister Ehud Olmert (L) shakes hands with his defense minister, Ehud Barak
(photo credit: REUTERS)
Attorney-General Yehuda Weinstein on Thursday closed the bribery investigation against former prime minister Ehud Barak.
In December 2014, the police had recommended closing the investigation, which was based on vague accusations against Barak by former prime minister Ehud Olmert.
The police had said they found no evidence to support the allegations, including in certain “secret” tapes of various Barak conversations discovered in a Defense Ministry safe.
Weinstein ordered the investigation in November 2014 based on bribery allegations Olmert made against Barak in a taped conversation made sometime in 2007 and 2009 with his former top aide Shula Zaken that his then-defense minister Barak had taken millions of dollars in bribes as part of arms and weapons transactions.
In the tapes, Olmert tells Zaken that Barak “has millions, tens of millions, stashed away in secret bank accounts in Switzerland or somewhere,” which he allegedly illegally skimmed off weapons deals.
Barak’s lawyers Ram Caspi and Eitan Maoz responded to the decision stating that he “praises the decision of the attorney-general to close the review after he found no evidentiary basis for even [justifying] opening the investigation.”
The former prime minister credited investigators with a “thorough investigation that makes it possible once and for all to remove from the agenda the falsehoods and slander that were said about him.”