The second day of cross-examination of former Walla CEO Ilan Yeshua started on Wednesday before the Jerusalem District Court in the public corruption trial of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Bezeq and Walla owner Shaul Elovitch.
Elovitch lawyer Jacques Chen blew a hole in the prosecution’s case and Yeshua’s credibility, showing that Yeshua lied to Haaretz about the alleged media bribery scheme underlying Case 4000, the Bezeq-Walla Affair.
Immediately after Yeshua texted Haaretz publisher Amos Schocken that “I have never lied to you,” he then went on to blatantly lie to him about whether Walla’s coverage was being influenced improperly.
In 2015, Haaretz had run various articles alleging that Walla, with Yeshua’s help, was being used by Netanyahu as part of what would be later called Case 4000, the Bezeq-Walla media bribery scheme.
Yeshua was denying the allegations in the Haaretz stories and trying to get Schocken to get the articles changed to be more favorable to Walla.
In 2015, Yeshua told Haaretz, “There is no pressure from Elovitch” and “there is no slanted coverage for Netanyahu at Walla,” but on Wednesday he admitted these denials were false.
Yeshua admitted plainly that he had lied to Schocken immediately after promising to tell the truth because “I wanted to stop the campaign against Walla.”
He added that “all CEOs would do this” and lie to the media to defend their companies if their company was under public attack.
The former Walla CEO tried to put the responsibility for his lie back on Elovitch, but Chen showed that in various instances, Yeshua appeared to be acting on his own initiative.
However, Yeshua said that Schocken knew he was lying to him, seemingly to try to reduce the impact of his lie.
Later Wednesday, the defense also highlighted text messages between Yeshua, Elovitch and public relations official Rani Rahav from May 19, 2015, during which they discussed the Haaretz articles.
If the prosecution is right and there was a media conspiracy, then one would expect that even if these three officials might lie to the media, they would acknowledge the bribery scheme among each other in private.
Instead, the messages paint a picture that even in private messages between the three of them about the Haaretz article, they viewed the Haaretz story as speculative.
Earlier, Chen succeeded in honing in on a different hole in the prosecution’s case, proving that two of three negative articles allegedly requested by Netanyahu, relating to Naftali Bennett, never went online.
When the prosecution presented Yeshua’s testimony, it only mentioned that one article was blocked by Yeshua, but not that the majority of the articles did not go up.
The fact that a majority of the articles were never posted supports the defense’s argument that Yeshua and Walla were acting independently and not following orders from Netanyahu and Elovitch all of the time.
According to the amended indictment, from January 17-19, 2013 – days before the January 22 election – Netanyahu, through messengers, made no fewer than six demands to Walla owner Elovitch to influence media coverage positively for him and negatively for Naftali Bennett and his Bayit Yehudi Party.
All of the Netanyahu-Elovitch plans allegedly led to the coverage the prime minister sought, including negative coverage of Bennett’s wife allegedly eating at a nonkosher restaurant, and negative coverage of Bennett’s father, in exchange for the prime minister helping Elovitch’s Bezeq obtain NIS 1 billion ($300 million) in profits.
However, now it has been shown that the requested articles about Bennett’s wife and father were never posted.
In a moment that showed the struggle between Yeshua and Chen, the former Walla CEO tried to clean up the issue by saying, “I agree that the one article did not go up, but” and before he could finish, Chen interrupted, “you mean two articles.”
Yeshua then had to stop and admitted, “the two articles.”
Eventually, Yeshua did get to explain that even if the articles did not all go up, in his view the three days of being harassed by Elovitch and Netanyahu messenger Zeev Rubinstein, which was over the weekend, proved the extraordinary level of interference by the prime minister in Walla’s daily affairs which characterized the media bribery scheme.