State Attorney Shai Nitzan is not obliged to release the legal opinion he submitted to Attorney General Avichai Mendelblit regarding two of the corruption investigations against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the High Court of Justice ruled on Monday.
The decision comes in response to a petition by The Movement for Quality Government in Israel, which asked the court to force Nitzan to make public the summary of his legal opinion regarding cases 1,000 and 2,000 because of supposed differences between him and Mendelblit over the charges Netanyahu should face in court.
Case 1,000 centers on gifts Netanyahu and his wife, Sara, allegedly received from billionaire businessmen Arnon Milchan and James Packer.
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Case 2,000 focuses on an illicit deal Netanyahu allegedly tried to strike with Yedioth Ahronoth publisher Arnon Mozes under which the daily would soften its aggressive anti-Netanyahu stance in return for the prime minister using his influence to curtail the activities of Israel Hayom, Yedioth's chief rival.
Netanyahu has also been embroiled in Case 4,000, in which he is suspected of having offered Shaul Elovitch, the controlling shareholder in the Bezeq communications giant, regulatory benefits supposedly worth hundreds of millions of shekels in exchange for favorable coverage of Netanyahu and his family on the Bezeq-owned Walla news website.
Mendelblit plans to indict Netanyahu on fraud and breach of trust in all three cases, as well as on one count of accepting a bribe in Case 4,000.
In the court ruling on Thursday, the justices said that there were "no grounds to second guess Mendelblit's decision [on the scope of the charges]."
The petitioners slammed the ruling saying that "Supreme Court precedents have made it clear that whenever there are substantial disagreements among investigators, then legal opinions should be made public, as was the case in Netanyahu's corruption probes in the 1990s."
The organization said releasing the information would allow the public to fully understand what guided the attorney general in his decisions regarding corruption cases of public officials.
