On this question, I believe the words of Meir Ben Shimon, according to which he had no acquaintance with defendant 1 and he never met him for business purposes, and certainly did not give him his identity card or personal details, for the purpose of establishing any company. If there had been a hint of truth in the version of defendant 3, there would have been no need for Meir Ben Shimon's signature to be forged in the documents of incorporation of JCC and ICT, and it is reasonable to assume that Meir Ben Shimon would have come forward to sign any document, had it been done with his knowledge and consent.
To the question of the criminal responsibility of defendant 3, I will address below.
As for defendant 1, the prosecution did not attribute to him, from the outset, any offense related to the 18th charge, and according to it, this was done by mistake. According to the prosecution, there is nothing to prevent the defendant from being convicted of the offenses included in this indictment, since he was given a full opportunity to defend himself, since her claim that this defendant controlled the JCC and ICT companies was raised in other parts of the indictment, so that the defendant could relate to these claims and present his evidence regarding them.
It should be said at this point that I see no reason not to accede to the prosecution's request and to include defendant 1 in the framework of the 18th indictment. Indeed, allegations concerning JCC and ICT companies were explicitly raised in the framework of Charges 3-7 and Charge 17, and Defendant 1 defended himself against these claims, both during the trial and in the extensive defense summaries. I do not see any basis for the defense's argument that the defendant was not given a reasonable opportunity to defend himself, and the same is true of the claim of limitation that was raised in the framework of the summaries.
The claim of limitation has no substance, since the limitation period should not be counted from the date of the alleged offense, but rather that the statute of limitations was stopped by a "disconnecting event", i.e., the investigation conducted against defendant 1 and the very filing of the indictment, in which the factual allegations included in the 18th indictment were mentioned. (See Yaakov on this matter.) Kedmi, On Criminal Procedure, Part Two (a), Updated Edition, 5769-2009, at p. 1320).