Hearing the Defendant's General Arguments
- The various testimonies, both the prosecution's testimonies and the defense's testimonies, indicate mechanisms for supervision and approval by the IPS for construction projects, so there is no dispute about the existence of these mechanisms. However, both the prosecution's testimonies and the defense testimonies indicate the feasibility of using the "inflation mechanism", as the accuser claimed.
According to the testimony of the prosecution witness, the head of the construction branch, Ran Oppenheim, who served in the position during the period relevant to the indictment, quantities can be inflated, and there is no authority in the district above the construction officer to check the correspondence between the bill of quantities and the execution in the field. The district officials have less professional ability in terms of performing inspections, and it is difficult to come up with a retrospective contractor's lie. The prosecution's witness, Lt. Col. Mark Alfasi, who served in his position for part of the relevant period, testified that the defendant was a professional authority in his field, and that there was a possibility of "playing" the budget within the framework of the price proposals. The witness testified that he lacked professional knowledge in order to seriously examine the defendant's actions. The defense did not raise specific claims against the credibility of the two. In the last part of the judgment, the defendant's claim regarding "tailoring files" will be discussed. I will preface by saying that this argument is also liable to be rejected, and it did not raise a specific claim against these two witnesses.
As I have already noted, the defense witnesses provided support for the accuser's claim. Lt. Gen. Goldblatt, head of the Construction Department of the IPS, did indeed resign from his position before the relevant period of the indictment, but according to his testimony, even though he was very involved in the field, he did not examine every bill of quantities and did not know whether there were discrepancies between the quantities recorded and the actual execution, and it is quite possible that there were discrepancies.