Sara Netanyahu, the wife of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was indicted on Thursday for suspected financial irregularities in the management of the Prime Minister's Residence.
She denies any wrongdoing.
The Prime Minister's Residence affair is the collective term for a number of cases concerning the official residence in Jerusalem. The main case centers on suspicions that, between 2010 and 2013, Netanyahu misused public funds by spending some 390,000 shekels (over $100,000) on catered gourmet meals, despite employing two state-funded cooks.
The prime minister's wife faces charges of fraud, breach of trust and aggravated fraudulent receipt of goods. If convicted, she could face up to five years behind bars.
Ezra Saidoff, a former deputy director of the Prime Minister's Office, was also indicted in the case. He faces charges of fraud, breach of trust, fraudulently obtaining goods, and falsifying records pertaining to the funding of private expenses at the Prime Minister's Residence.
The indictment, filed with the Jerusalem Magistrates' Court, followed a three-year investigation.
The prosecution claims that Netanyahu and Saidoff collaborated to fraudulently obtained hundreds of catered meals that were delivered to the Prime Minister's Residence, while deliberately violating Civil Service regulations. The two did so by falsely claiming the Prime Minister's Residence was devoid of a full-time cook when, if fact, several cooks were employed there at the time.
"Through this misrepresentation, the defendants managed to deceive the relevant officials in the [Prime Minister's] Office and ensure both the employment of full-time cooks at the Prime Minister's Residence and funding for meals prepared by chefs and restaurants and delivered to the residence," the indictment stated.
Prosecutors said that each catered meal cost between hundreds and thousands of shekels, saying dozens of meals were delivered to the Jerusalem residence each month.
Another case included in the indictment, dubbed the "waiters' affair," alleges that the prime minister's wife demanded external waiting staff be employed in the residence during the weekends and when private functions were held there.
"The defendant demanded that waiting services at the Prime Minister's Residence be supplied by specific waiters she deemed to be 'highly qualified,'" the indictment said.
According to the prosecution, these waiters' wages were substantially higher than other staffers at the official residence, prompting Saidoff to instruct them to report longer working hours than they actually performed, to justify the expense.
The indictment also covered the employment of an electrician, whose hiring had originally been scrapped by the Prime Minister's Office due to his close ties with the Netanyahu family. Saidoff is accused of falsifying documents so as to circumvent the PMO's original order that the contract with this specific electrician be annulled.
Sara Netanyahu's lawyers said the indictment was "ludicrous," adding that other employees at the residence had ordered the meals and that the restrictions on ordering food there were invalid.
"There was no fraud or breach of trust or fraudulent receipt of items or any other offense. The prime minister's wife, who is not a public servant, did not know about the regulations in question and was found to have spoken truthfully when answering questions during a lie detector test," they said in a statement.
"The most absurd thing in the indictment stems from the fact that it is based on illegal regulations, and even the person who wrote the regulations admits that they are illegal. The regulations covering food were written on the fly by three officials who were unauthorized to do so," the statement said.
Yehoshua Reznik, who represents Saidoff, said the charges were "fundamentally wrong and inconsistent with the legal and factual situation as shown by the evidence in the case."
