The prosecution claims that defendant 1 and Yehoshua Shlosh presented a copy of the sea bill of lading, bearing a forged stamp, to a representative of the Orian company at Ben-Gurion Airport, taking advantage of the lack of skill of the company's clerk in charge of air transportation documents, in accordance with the method in which there is no strict presentation of the original. Eli Friedman, an employee of the Orian branch at Ben Gurion Airport, explained in his testimony that he was not aware that in sea shipping it was necessary to present an original bill of lading and that it was not enough to transfer a copy of the bill of lading. According to him, he made do with the fact that the conversion stamp looked original. According to him, he was called by a man who works in one of the company's maritime branches, and told him that a courier from the customs brokerage company, Shai Customs Agents, would arrive to deliver a bank transfer for sea shipment. He was asked to check and make sure that the stamps were in good working order and to confirm this to them over the phone. The witness added: "... After a while, a guy arrived, showed me the conversion, saw that the stamps were original and confirmed it to our maritime branch. The problem was that I am a man from the air field, and in the air field you can put a bank stamp on a photocopied bill of lading, and in the maritime domain you can't, and I didn't know that" (p. 99 of the transcript, lines 12-15). Friedman identified the bill of lading, P/17, as a document that was presented to him. It should be noted that according to him, following this incident, the procedures were changed and it was determined that "no one from the air will handle sea conversions and no one from the sea will handle aerial conversions, and this was separated. This means that no one from another department will approve" (p. 102, lines 12-14).
There is no dispute that it was Mrs. Valerie Amsalem of the Orian office in Tel Aviv who received Eli Friedman's erroneous approval and authorized the Haifa office to deliver the customs broker a gate pass, after she understood from Friedman that he had received a bill of lading that had been converted by the bank, and all this – without seeing the bill with her own eyes.