A wave of protests continued to mount today against a government panel’s report absolving the managing director of the Netivei Neft oil company of charges of wrongdoing. The protests were directed against the majority of the three-man committee, headed by Supreme Court Justice Albert Vitkon, who found that although Mordechai Friedman, managing director of the government-owned firm, could be faulted for certain administrative irregularities, his dismissal was not warranted.
Hundreds of Hebrew University students signed a letter last night to Premier Golda Meir urging the Cabinet to reject the majority report, signed by Judge Vitkon and industrialist Avraham Kalir, in favor of the dissenting opinion of the third panel member, Reserves Maj. Gen. Meir Zorea. Zorea recommended that Friedman be fired and was critical of Deputy Finance Minister Zvi Din-stein for laxity in overseeing the operations of Netivei Neft.
Earlier, Prof. Natan Rotenstreich, a former Rector of the Hebrew University, and Prof. Shmuel Eisenstadt, dean of the social sciences faculty, accused the committee’s majority report of using financial success as a yardstick and neglecting questions of ethical and moral conduct in the Netivei Neft case. The majority report found Friedman not guilty of wrongdoing in the sale, at a large profit, of equipment belonging to a private firm owned by him to another firm closely connected to Netivei Neft.
RARE INSTANCE OF CRITICISM
The letter from Hebrew U. students stated: “We are infinitely concerned with the possibility that the social and moral norms legitimized by the report are apt to serve as educational guidelines.” The students added that even if the conditions reported by the committee majority reflected realism, they could not accept the majority’s acquiescence in them.
The government panel released its report last week after four weeks of hearings on charges that the management of Netivei Neft which operates captured Egyptian oil wells in the Sinai was guilty of fraud, bribery, corruption and immoral behavior. The charges, made by a government geologist, were sensationalized in some newspapers. The present public furor over the committee’s majority findings is one of the rare instances here in which a Supreme Court Justice has been openly criticized.
The Labor Alignment’s Knesset faction meanwhile has invited Finance Minister Pinhas Sapir to render a progress report on the draft of legislation that would tighten controls over state-owned corporations. The Vitkon committee recommended that existing rules be revised but claimed that it was difficult to find enough qualified economists to effectively control every aspect of State corporation activities.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
