Labor Party drowning in forgeries
Private investigator Meir Palevsky responsible for checking party membership forms, warns that almost half are problematic or suspected forgeries; new Labor Party members might have been recruited with bribes; says Palvasky, ‘I have no intention of being a part of this farce’
TEL AVIV - While everyone in the Labor Party is shouting to high heaven about the importance of keeping the headquarters clean of corruption, private investigator Meir Palevsky has raised serious concerns about widespread forgery involving party membership forms.
Palevsky, who is responsible for checking the forms, wrote Monday to party official Nimrod Eshkol, warning him that previous examinations were superficial and influenced by partisan interests.
Ynetnews obtained a copy of the letter.
“A superficial and incidental check found that almost 50 percent of the forms were problematic or suspected of forgeries and were cast aside,” Palevsky writes. There’s a respectable amount of people who tried to disguise their signatures on the forms, or in simple Hebrew: A single person signed for many.”
The private investigator said the actual amount of suspected forgeries was “colossal.”
Palevsky added that the examination of the forms was superficial and constantly interrupted by interested parties who tried to influence the process in unseemly ways. Instead of using graphologists to check the forms, as an oversight committee had requested, students were used.
He also said that he suspects that many of those who recently joined the Labor Party did so by way of financial inducements, and he threatened to quit if the party to not begin an in-depth internal investigation into the scandal.
“I have no intention of being a part of this farce,” he wrote.
Letter sent on to Labor officials
Palevsky sent his letter to oversight committee chairman Eshkol, who earlier had asked Attorney General Menachem Mazuz to send Justice Ministry workers to help out the Labor headquarters and other parties with cross-checking their data.
Labor Party Knesset Member Danny Yatom said that he had not yet received Palevsky’s letter.
But sources close to Yatom said that the investigator is upset that the party did not agree to hire one of his workers, and the party is thinking of switching him “because of constant leaks to the press.”
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