Mazuz: Lieberman should not have been made FM

Attorney General Menachem Mazuz yesterday criticized Avigdor Lieberman's appointment as foreign minister, saying the Yisrael Beiteinu chairman would never have been given this job in a "properly run country." Police have said recently that they believe it will be possible to indict Lieberman on several serious charges, including taking bribes, money laundering and obstruction of justice.

Mazuz made his remark at the Israel Bar Association's annual Eilat conference, where he was discussing the role of the law enforcement system in setting behavioral norms for public officials. He argued that this system should not have been the primary enforcer of norms; rather, he said, a properly functioning society should have nonlegal ways of enforcing norms, such as public pressure.

"The public-political system needs to set codes of behavior," he said. "The real problem is not the existence of unacceptable behavior, but the lack of remedies for such behavior in the public sphere."

In particular, he said, people who violate proper norms are not repudiated by the political system. Their conduct is denounced, but at the same time, "suspected criminals are appointed as ministers, and a minister who was convicted immediately returned to public life as a senior minister, after a cooling-off period of one day." The latter reference was to former minister Haim Ramon of Kadima, though Mazuz did not mention him by name.

Several politicians have been appointed ministers while already under police investigation, but Lieberman is the most recent. Mazuz therefore cited him as an example of the gap between the ideal and the Israeli reality.

"A properly run country should not reach such a situation," he said, adding that such appointments "constitute failures of the public system." The legal system should not be involved in preventing such appointments, he argued, but the political system can and should - as it is in the United States.

"Just look at the minor, trivial flaws, that would only merit one line on page 17 of the newspaper here, over which the U.S. has rejected candidates for office," Mazuz said.

Meanwhile, police are increasingly convinced that they have enough evidence to justify filing charges against Lieberman. The minister and several of his associates are suspected of having set up a network of companies, some of them shell companies, with the goal of laundering tens of millions of shekels and then pocketing the money.

Police said they are still uncertain where the money came from, but claim that Lieberman incriminated himself during his interrogation. They denied that any difficulties have arisen during the probe, and said the delay in transferring the material to the State Prosecutor's Office stemmed solely from the foreign minister's busy schedule, which meant that interrogation sessions had to be spaced out.

Police also said that the suspected bribe-taking was minor compared to the other offenses of which Lieberman is suspected, and may ultimately be left out of any indictment - especially if a plea bargain is signed. The primary charge is money laundering, but police also think it may be possible to indict Lieberman and his associates on three counts of obstructing justice, for the three times they allegedly changed the names of shell companies in Cyprus because they suspected that police detectives had discovered the companies and wanted to throw them off the scent.