Dechner With Olmert
The name of the late state's witness in the Holyland corruption case against former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was revealed by a Tel Aviv district court on Tuesday, after a gag order on his identity was lifted.
The man previously known as S.D., who died over the weekend at the age of 76, was Shmuel Dechner, a businessman and real-estate entrepreneur who served for many years as a consultant to the owner of the Holyland project, Hillel Charney.
According to the indictment, Dechner helped Charney reach high-ranking figures in the Jerusalem municipality and bribe them in exchange for promoting the Holyland project, as well as other real-estate projects. Toward the end of his life, Dechner went millions of shekels into debt on the gray market, had conflicts with his business partners and was forced to break his silence.
Born in Romania and a survivor of the Holocaust, Dechner held high-ranking positions at several Israeli companies. Later in life, he tried his luck at real estate, but without success, and left the country. When he returned in the late 1980s, he worked as a real-estate entrepreneur and consultant. He also worked as a “manager,” as he put it, or business consultant on the Holyland project for many years.
The dispute over money owed him by the project’s owner, Hillel Charney, came to a head in mid-2008 when Dechner sent Charney a letter warning that he was about to sue him. He attached a draft of the lawsuit to the letter. Many of the documents appended to the lawsuit served as a basis for the police’s probe into the Holyland affair and finally led to an indictment.
In 2009, Dechner went to the police and offered them information on three cases of bribery of millions of shekels in exchange for the promotion of real-estate projects. In his testimony, Dechner described the mechanism of transferring the bribes to high-ranking municipality officials, elected officials and employees of the Israel Land Administration in exchange for favors and leniencies for the Holyland and other real-estate projects. Dechner backed up his testimony with hundreds of documents whose credibility is now a subject of dispute in the trial. The documents include photocopies of checks and recordings of conversations with people involved in the affair.
The State Prosecutor’s Office described the incidents Dechner revealed as unprecedented in their severity. As a result of his testimony, indictments were handed down against 16 defendants, including former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert from his terms as minister of industry, trade and labor and mayor of Jerusalem.
Other defendants included Olmert’s successor as mayor of Jerusalem, Uri Lupoliansky; Olmert’s former bureau chief, Shula Zaken; former Jerusalem municipal engineer Uri Shetreet; the former head of the Israel Land Administration, Yaakov Efrati; and the former chairman of the board of Bank Hapoalim, Dan Dankner.
When the indictments were served, Ella Rubinek, the Tel Aviv district prosecutor for taxation and finance, said, “The indictments reveal a multi-faceted, complex and unprecedented affair full of corrupt and illicit connections among a group of entrepreneurs, who handed out the bribes, and a long list of elected officials and public officials, who took them.” She also said, “The indictment and the decisions made about it could have significant and far-reaching effects, in both the public and legal spheres.”
A Justice Ministry spokesman said at the time, “The indictment is severe not only in its scope but also in the fact that this is not about a single public servant who became corrupt, but rather a large number of public servants and elected officials, from members of the Jerusalem city council, the municipal engineer, two mayors of Jerusalem and the head of the Israel Land Administration to the minister of industry, trade and labor and his bureau chief.”
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