ISRAEL: Police investigators questioned the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon, for more than six hours yesterday at his official residence over possible financial wrongdoing, but he denied any illegal behaviour relating to a series of complex allegations which have been dogging him for months.
Mr Sharon is not the first Israeli prime minister to face such investigation: the late Yitzhak Rabin resigned as prime minister in the 1970s after it emerged that his wife had illegally maintained a bank account in Washington, and both of Mr Sharon's predecessors, Mr Ehud Barak and Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, were questioned over election fund-raising irregularities, but never charged.
The allegations swirling around Mr Sharon all relate to the internal elections in his Likud party which won him the leadership in 1999, en route to becoming prime minister two years later.
One raft of suspicions revolves around funds for that campaign, which Mr Sharon returned to donors after the authorities informed him they had been raised in breach of electoral legislation. It is alleged that Mr Sharon and/or his two sons, Omri and Gilad, raised the money to repay the donors via illegal loans from overseas businessmen.
The main focus of yesterday's questioning relates to his ties to a leading local businessman, Mr David Appel, who reportedly helped Mr Sharon in his campaign for the Likud leadership with finance and other support.
Police are said to have asked Mr Sharon if, in return, he provided backing for Mr Appel's business ventures. Specifically, he was questioned over the "Greek island affair", an effort by Mr Appel to develop a Greek island tourist resort, for which he needed Greek government backing.
Mr Appel employed Mr Sharon's son Gilad as a consultant on the project and paid him hundreds of thousands of dollars. Investigators want to know whether Mr Sharon, when foreign minister in the late 1990s, intervened on Mr Appel's behalf with the Greeks.
Mr Sharon was reported last night to have answered all the questions put to him, to have denied any wrongdoing and to have referred the investigators to his sons. Mr Gilad Sharon has already been questioned, has invoked the right to silence and is fighting through the courts not to hand over possible material evidence to the police.
The prime minister is said to have spent much of the past few days preparing for the questioning, distracting him from the still-bubbling controversy over public criticism of his government's policies vis- à-vis the Palestinians, levelled by the army's Chief of Staff, Gen Moshe Ya'alon.
Several cabinet ministers are indicating support for Gen Ya'alon's assertion that Israel's restrictions on Palestinian movement in the West Bank are fuelling hatred and support for extremist groups, although several other ministers have lambasted the chief of staff for making his concerns public.
At a meeting on Wednesday with the Defence Minister, Mr Shaul Mofaz, a prime target of his criticism, Gen Ya'alon said he had intended to brief reporters on differences of opinion in the defence establishment and had not intended to criticise the government.