MIDDLE EAST:Providing a huge personal boost to Prime Minister Mr Ariel Sharon as he pushes ahead with a plan to relinquish the Gaza Strip, Israel's top state prosecutor yesterday closed a long-standing bribery investigation against the prime minister for lack of evidence.
Aides to Mr Sharon expressed satisfaction at the decision by Attorney General Menahem Mazuz.
Mr Shimon Peres, the leader of the opposition Labour Party, indicated that Labour was now ready to discuss joining Mr Sharon's minority coalition, a move which would restore its parliamentary majority and stabilise it ahead of Mr Sharon's intended Gaza withdrawal over the coming months.
Appearing rather nervous, at times even breathless, as he announced his decision at a press conference at the Justice Ministry, Mr Mazuz, who was appointed attorney-general at the start of the year, was nevertheless robust and unequivocal in detailing why he saw no reason to indict Mr Sharon, or his son Gilad, in the bribery case. The evidence gathered during the painstaking investigation, he said, did not provide a "reasonable possibility of conviction".
In some areas, he added, "it wasn't even close." The high stakes notwithstanding, Mr Mazuz said he had applied the same standards of evidence with respect to Mr Sharon as he would to any citizen, and had not required a higher probability of conviction.
Briefing correspondents in private later, Mr Mazuz levelled withering criticism at his former deputy, the State Attorney Edna Arbel, who just weeks ago recommended indicting Mr Sharon over the affair and even drew up a charge sheet. That recommendation needed Mr Mazuz's approval; instead, yesterday, he firmly overturned it.
The case against Mr Sharon was deeply flawed, said Mr Mazuz, and he intimated that Ms Arbel, who has since been promoted to a position as a judge on the Israeli Supreme Court, had handled the investigation unprofessionally, going so far as to appoint colleagues to work on it who shared her unwarranted preconception that the prime minister should be prosecuted.
The investigation revolved around a grandiose, and ultimately aborted, project by a businessman friend of Mr Sharon's, Mr David Appel, to build a tourist resort on an island off the coast of Greece. Among the people hired by Mr Appel was Mr Sharon's son Gilad, who was paid $640,000 for slightly more than two years' work as an adviser. Ms Arbel had opined that this money was essentially a bribe - paid to the son so that the father would use his influence to help advance the Greek island project.
Mr Mazuz insisted yesterday, however, that Mr Gilad Sharon's employment was entirely legitimate, and that the pay scale, though high, was matched by other payments made by Mr Appel to others who worked on what was to have been a $15 billion project.
Quite astoundingly, given Mr Mazuz's determination yesterday that there was nothing untoward in the payments to Gilad Sharon, Mr Appel was indicted earlier this year over those very payments - indicted, that is, for bribing Mr Sharon. Now Mr Mazuz has indicated that he will re-examine the charges against Mr Appel, presumably with a view to dropping them.
Mr Sharon is still under investigation in a second matter, over alleged improprieties in election fundraising, but he may reasonably feel that the worst is now over. Still, opponents of Mr Sharon say they may appeal Mr Mazuz's decision to the Supreme Court. "Appel gave, Sharon took," said Mr Yossi Sarid, head of the left-wing Meretz party. "If that's not bribery, what is?"