05/02/2004 By Baruch Kra, Haaretz Correspondent Prime Minister Ariel Sharon will be questioned Thursday by the police’s International Investigations Unit about his suspected role in the so-called Greek island affair. Sharon will be asked, among other things, whether he was aware of the multimillion dollar contract his son Gilad signed with contractor David Appel. Police will want to know what Sharon understood from a conversation with Appel in which the Likud kingmaker and real estate tycoon told him that his son was going to earn a lot of money.
The investigators will arrive early Thursday morning at Sharon’s official residence in Jerusalem, led, as they were last time Sharon was questioned, by Deputy Commander Yohanan Danino, the commander of the International Investigations Unit. Danino will be accompanied by Chief Superintendents Avital Knoller and Gideon Gabai. The team was sent to complete the interrogation of Sharon after Central District Attorney Rachel Sheaber, who is in charge of the case for the prosecution after replacing Anat Savidor, decided that there was important evidence that necessitated asking the prime minister additional questions before deciding whether to prepare an indictment against him. Sharon will be asked to explain transcripts of conversations between him and Appel that were tape recorded by police, who are particularly suspicious of the proximity between Appel’s promise of great wealth for Sharon’s son and Sharon’s efforts on Appel’s behalf to get the Ginaton farmlands near Lod rezoned for residential purposes. Sharon will also be asked about his efforts on Appel’s behalf in the so-called Greek island affair, in which Appel was trying to win the Greek government’s permission for a huge resort on an empty island off the coast of Greece. Sharon is suspected of helping to lobby the Greek government for that purpose, among other things, by granting his patronage to a meeting between the Greek deputy foreign minister and Appel’s commercial representative in Greece, Norman Skolnick. The Greek island case has become the symbol of a series of police probes into whether Appel assisted Sharon’s 1999 Likud primaries campaign and paid off Sharon’s son, Gilad, to bribe Sharon into using his influence – both as foreign minister and as the minister in charge of the Israel Lands Administration – to help Appel’s real estate deals in Israel and the abortive Greek island resort plan. Appel provided Sharon with 30 to 40 activists and a headquarters in the 1999 campaign, and he paid Gilad, who had no business experience in either tourism or marketing, some $700,000 to market the nonexistent tourist resort, promising him twice that if Appel received permission from the Greek government to build the resort and more if the resort was actually built. The Cyril Kern link is not far behind During his final review of the material in the Greek island case, which will begin next week, Attorney General Menachem Mazuz will also study the evidentiary material in another probe now being conducted by the National Fraud Squad, regarding the shell companies that raised money for Ariel Sharon’s primary campaign and the loan his son Gilad received from businessman Cyril Kern. The Tel Aviv District Court is supposed to decide in the coming days whether court orders issued against Gilad Sharon oblige him to give the police banking records from Austria. If the court decides that is the case and the Supreme Court refuses to hear an appeal, Gilad will hand over the documents, according to his lawyer, Micha Fettman. Once the investigators have those documents, police will try to complete the puzzle to find out who actually financed the millions of dollars that were transferred from BAWAG, the Austrian bank, to Gilad Sharon’s accounts in Israel. Police believe that certain suspects in the case have already been preparing for the possibility that the documents will reach the detectives and have already prepared answers to the potential questions they might be asked. But even so, prosecutors and police believe that they will be able to reach the truth in the case, as much material has been gathered over the past year. BPI.
