In addition, on February 14, 2017, Schiff Tali conveys information about Dennis de Young, according to which he is a Dutch politician.
- All of the comments, as detailed above, are not forwarded to the plaintiffs or to any of them, but from the internal correspondence between the bank's employees, there is documentation dated March 7, 2017 that "the customer's documents were examined in a joint meeting. The findings examined do not satisfy and do not constitute a criminal appeal of the requirements detailed to the client."
Further to this decision, on March 20, 2017, I find a notice of closure to the plaintiffs as follows:
"1. As we have stated on a number of different occasions, the manner in which the account is managed is inconsistent with the customary conduct of the bank for such an account and with your declarations when opening the accounts.
- You have been asked by us to provide sufficient explanations and documents for the nature of the activity in the Group's accounts. It should be emphasized that you received a detailed and accurate list from us and did not meet it.
- We are required by the Bank of Israel to be familiar with the client's activity and to receive appropriate explanations and references for each receipt and every action carried out in the account. Lack forces us not to allow receipts to be deposited into accounts. "
- I have devoted an extensive scope to a chronological detail of the proceeding as it was conducted between the bank and its customers, as in my opinion it speaks for itself and leads to a conclusion and accordingly there were flaws in the proceeding as taken by the bank. Thus and first, the presentation of the documents and correspondence between the bank and the plaintiffs-its customers, in contrast to the correspondence between the bank's employees, indicates conduct as a kind of presentation in which these in the face of the demands that were presented to the customer "on stage", exist and stand - the bank's opinions, concerns and decisions "behind the scenes". From the latter, we learn that in theory and in practice, the bank made its decision regarding the closure of the account, long before the date on which it announced the closure of the account, and that the bank's action "on the stage", i.e., vis-à-vis the customers, from that date onwards, was intended to justify its decision and there was no real willingness to allow the customers to remove the suspicions and continue the activity.
Thus, and as already noted, it is clear that after a round of requests for documents and information that took place in July 2016 and which on the face of it was met to the satisfaction of the bank, and the evidence - since July 2016 the activity continued as usual, in November 2016, a decision was made to stop the plaintiffs' activity, initially with the reason for this being the investigations being conducted against Toledano and Saar Pilosof. Following this decision, a decision is made to close the accounts - which is clearly a harsher sanction than the cessation of activity, all without any basis for this and even worse - without the customers being aware of the aforementioned decision, and all the more so without giving them the opportunity to deal with the evil of the decree. I will note that with regard to the date on which the decision regarding closure was made, the determination that the closure decision was made as early as November 2016, which was confirmed by Mr. Lotem in his testimony [see his testimony of May 15, 2018, on page 34].
- I am of the opinion that the continuation of the conduct, from the date of the decision onwards, indicates that the decision was made in the heart of the bank and that it had no real desire to allow the customers their day. This conclusion has many reinforcements. First, in this regard, it is possible to point to correspondence from which it appears that the bank's employees are trying to find additional reasons for closing the accounts, such as threats, reasons that the bank retracted in the framework of the legal proceeding, and the suspicion that arises as a result, the above discussion has already been devoted [see paragraph 53 above of the judgment]. Similarly, at certain stages of the process, an argument is raised by the bank's employees that the initiative to close the accounts or to order the return of funds is Toledano's - as to the claim that Toledano agreed that from July onwards no more dividend funds would be deposited into his account, with regard to Toledano's agreement to return the dividend funds in November, and with regard to Toledano's alleged agreement to close the accounts. The bank did not retract these claims in the framework of the previous proceeding, and even worse - the bank did not testify to the officials in the bank to whom the matter was allegedly expressed by Toledano, nor did it even question Toledano in the framework of the cross-examination about his claims.
Moreover, it can be seen that in some cases the documents that were transferred by the plaintiffs were not examined at all by the relevant employees of the bank, including many documents were not forwarded to the bank's compliance department in order for it to examine the documents. Moreover, in some cases, the same documents were transferred again and again when the bank demanded them again and did not pay attention to the fact that the documents had already been transferred to it.