Peres hints: Peretz should be indicted

Former Labor MK wants chairman indicted for problematic voter drive.

By GIL STERN STERN HOFFMAN
dignified peres 298 88aj (photo credit: Ariel Jerozolimski [file])
dignified peres 298 88aj
(photo credit: Ariel Jerozolimski [file])
Kadima candidate Shimon Peres called upon Attorney-General Menachem Mazuz on Wednesday to indict Labor chairman Amir Peretz for the problematic voter registration drive that Peretz utilized to defeat Peres in the November 9 Labor primary. Peres was reacting to a Supreme Court decision on Wednesday to reject a petition by the Labor Party to disqualify the candidacies of former Labor MKs and current Kadima Knesset candidates Peres, Haim Ramon and Dalia Itzik. "The petition was unnecessary and vengeful, it shamed Labor and it embarrassed the party's members," Peres said. "The people who filed the petition should be indicted for breach of trust, for the forgeries in the voter registration drive, the irregularities in the Labor primary and for failure to take responsibility for the great damage that has been done to the party." A Kadima spokesman added that "Labor's political pursuit of Peres proves that Peretz and his party cannot run the country." Labor candidate Yoram Maciano, a former Peres adviser, responded that when Peres was Labor's interim chairman, he never questioned the authenticity of the membership drive. Marciano said that had he been alive, former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin would have been shocked by Peres's behavior. "Suddenly today he remembers to blame Peretz for the all the problems that he [Peres] caused the party over the past 20 years," Marciano said. "As someone who accompanied Peres for many years out of love, it is hard for me to see how [Kadima strategists] Eyal Arad and Reuven Adler are causing him to shame himself. Peres's place is fighting for peace and not next to Tzahi Hanegbi and Ehud Olmert in Kadima." Meanwhile, a large group of Labor activists left the party on Wednesday for Kadima. The group included the entire leadership of the Labor branch in Mazkeret Batya and most of Labor's Safed branch.