The defense's arguments that Mordechai's requests for price estimates from the manufacturers prevented the possibility of competition between the suppliers, including competition for their margins, and that Mordechai's request for price quotes to the suppliers was nothing but a false representation of competition. In any event, even the involvement of the manufacturers does not justify or legitimize coordination between the suppliers in relation to the price quotes they will submit.
- The arguments based on Mordechai's testimony: "This is not competition" - As stated above, Mordechai was an engineer and planner at Elta, who was also given powers in the field of procurement, including the authority to carry out pricing and to approach suppliers for price quotes (p. 1220, paras. 13-18; p. 1126, s. 9-10, s. 18-22; p. 1127, paras. 12-20). It was Mordechai who stood at the center of the bidding process at Balam Indra. We saw above that in the months preceding Indra's appointment, Mordechai approached various manufacturers to examine the contents of the equipment for the project and to obtain preliminary price estimates. This included IBM and HP (which operate in the field of servers and computing) and NetApp and EMC (which operate in the field of storage) (see paragraph 123 above and P/164). Mordechai then asked for quotes from the defendant companies - Wee, Harel and Triple C - which, as you may recall, are authorized suppliers of IBM.
In their summaries, the defendants, mainly Wei and Oshri tried to construct various statements by Mordechai in his testimony as if there was no competition in Balam Indra and that there was no competition in a competitive proceeding. This included his statement that he said, "I received price quotes" but "this is not competition" (p. 1163, paras. 13-20; See also p. 1253, paras. 19-24; p. 1161, paras. 3-17, where he also said that competition is between manufacturers and not between suppliers; and his answer at p. 1284, paras. 12-18, that he did not compete between suppliers but between manufacturers). The argument is that this testimony supports the fact that there was no competition between the suppliers in Balam Indra; For Wei was chosen in the first place; and that the request for price quotes was intended only to receive fictitious price quotes, with Mordechai's knowledge, for the purpose of complying with the civil appeal procedures and nothing more.