President Moshe Katsav is considering filing lawsuits against the
individual policemen and prosecutors involved in leaking information about his case to the media, Katsav's attorneys said yesterday.

In a letter to Attorney General Menachem Mazuz and Police Commissioner Moshe Karadi, attorneys Zion Amir and Avigdor Feldman argued that only by suing the leakers personally will "the wave of ugly, inaccurate and false leaks against the president be stopped."

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The police declined to respond to the letter officially, but several officers privately expressed fury. However, they added, they did not believe such suits would ever be filed.

"It's a media trick," said one, noting that the police have yet to hear Katsav accuse any specific policeman of leaking or offer proof to back his claims against the police. "If he had clear claims, or evidence to support his claims, he would have complained long since to the [Justice Ministry's] Police Investigations Department or published it in the media."

Meanwhile, State Prosecutor Eran Shendar is considering filing disciplinary charges against the legal adviser to the President's Residence over alleged irregularities in the handling of pardon applications. Shendar suspects that attorney Yona Sheindorf may have been guilty of breach of trust in this regard. However, he has concluded that if so, the violations were disciplinary rather than criminal.

The investigation against Sheindorf was an offshoot of a criminal
investigation into Katsav over his handling of pardon applications. At the time, police suspected that Katsav had been bribed by associates from the business world to pardon certain people. These suspicions later proved groundless, and were not included in the indictment against him. However, during the course of the probe, investigators began to suspect that Sheindorf was guilty of improprieties, including passing information about pardon applications to unauthorized people.

And in other related news, the High Court of Justice yesterday ordered the Knesset and its legal advisor to respond within two weeks to a petition demanding that the 90-MK majority required to oust a sitting president be declared illegal. The petition, filed by an agronomist from Kiryat Bialik, charges that this provision of the Basic Law on the President was passed with the votes of many fewer than 90 MKs, and is therefore illegitimate.