Omartha's Petition to the Court - Completing the Picture
- It also turned out that in that case, Omarta filed an administrative petition with the Tel Aviv District Court (administrative petition 50497-05-20), after which the petition was deleted with the consent of the parties, and on February 14,2021, a petition was filed with the High Court of Justice (High Court of Justice 1030/21).
- On April 13,2021, the Ministry of the Interior submitted a response to the Umrata petition (see Appendix 3 to the company's summaries), in which it detailed the sequence of events as detailed above, and clarified that the entire position that the municipality tried to claim that it did not understand had no basis because it knew the position of the Ministry of Interior well years ago, noting the following on its merits: (paragraphs 25-29):
"The petition should be dismissed even on its merits. As will be detailed below, the Respondent's position was accepted for professional reasons, taking into account the public interest, the public purse and the rules of proper governance. As clarified above, the main reasons for the Respondent's refusal to approve the transaction are based on two main grounds: a planning discrepancy between the designation of the land and the purpose of the tender at the time the tender was published, which led to the lack of appropriate consideration; and defects in the process of approving the transaction. ... It should be noted that the municipality also does not dispute that the decision to publish a tender at such an early stage of the planning leads to a loss of revenue; In a discussion held in the tenders committee regarding this tender on September 6,2016, the legal advisor to the municipality said that "from our experience, tenders for lots with unapproved rights always receive less, it is clear that if this plan had been approved, it could have received ILS 80 million for it as well... The significance of this course of action by the municipality is the loss of revenues of large and significant sums of money for the municipality."