There is a good chance that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert could be convicted of money laundering, a crime which carries a maximum 10-year jail sentence, a police source said Monday.
While a bribery charge is regarded as much harder to prove, Olmert would not be able to easily evade the money-laundering charges, the source added.
"I don't see how Olmert could get out of this rap, it is unlikely that he'd be able to use these felonies to get a plea bargain," one source said.
"The money-laundering felony is relatively easy to prove and the penalty for it is relatively severe," the source said. "All the prosecution has to do is to make sure the suspicious money transfers were carried out after the existing law went into effect."
The law, which was amended in recent years to facilitate convictions for money-laundering felonies, no longer requires the prosecution to prove that the money was illegally obtained.
The law was amended after Israel joined the international fight against money laundering and in view of Israel's prominent place on the world money-laundering map. The amended law was intended to deter businesspeople, money changers and crime organizations from carrying out money-laundering in Israel.
Some four months ago, the police fraud squad realized that the Talansky file would yield recommendations to the prosecution to press charges. The material gathered in the inquiry's first weeks showed that Olmert allegedly violated the law banning money-laundering, having received large sums of money from Morris Talansky without reporting its transfer to Israel.
Police and prosecutors feared public opinion would force Olmert to resign, but that in the end there would not be sufficient evidence to indict him. The pressure eased, however, once the evidence of money-laundering became solid and detectives could peg the other felonies to this main one. Since Olmert is an elected public official, the money-laundering affair would also be linked to suspected fraud and breach of trust.
Once the police had completed that evidentiary infrastructure, they focused on the suspicions that Talansky had bribed Olmert. Law enforcement sources said at the time that Olmert's attorneys' attempts to punch holes in Talansky's testimoney were "almost insignificant," as Olmert himself had admitted receiving cash and not reporting it. "That was enough to consolidate the indictment against him," the source said.
The police could not say, during the first weeks of the inquiry, whether they would be able to cement the bribery suspicions against Olmert, as they believed that Talansky had given the premier the money without the expectation of something in return. They believed at first that Talansky gave Olmert the money naively, due to his admiration for the prime minister.
However, their suspicions were raised after they noticed the proximity between one of Talansky's large money transfers to Olmert and the latter's attempt to help Talansky's mini-bar hotel enterprise, a few weeks later.
Finally police decided that the indictment against Olmert in the Talansky case could include charges of taking bribes, fraud and breach of trust and probably a series of tax violations. At the same time, the detectives discovered the Rishon Tours travel agency, in their attempt to track down Talansky's donations to finance Olmert's work-related trips overseas.
The Rishon Tours inquiry led to the discovery of the double-billing system, by which Olmert financed private flight tickets for his family over several years.
In the Rishon affair, the police recommended an indictment for fraud in aggravated circumstances, fraud, breach of trust and tax violations.
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