A report scathingly critical of Ariel Sharon’s Housing Ministry threatened this week to explode into a major scandal for Likud less than two months before the elections.
Accusations of corruption, maladministration and professional incompetence by State Comptroller Miriam Ben-Porat triggered demands for Sharon to resign.
Ben-Porat, a former member of the High Court of Justice, has asked Attorney General Yosef Harish to consider criminal prosecution in three areas related to the Housing Ministry’s activities.
While Sharon did not specifically deny the comptroller’s report, he said he put a halt to improper practices whenever they were brought to his attention. If officials and directors of government companies are found to have been at fault, they will have to “bear their responsibility,” he told reporters.
The comptroller, the state’s official watchdog, traditionally exercises broad autonomy and is non-partisan.
Ben-Porat said that while the government’s crash program to provide homes for immigrants was praiseworthy in principle, it spawned administrative malpractice.
She observed that the ministry’s choice of contractors for some projects was suspect or made on ill-considered or arbitrary grounds.
Selections often were related to Likud political favoritism, the comptroller said.
She singled out Limor Livnat of Likud, whom she accused of using her Sharon-appointed, non-salaried position as head of the ministry’s Housing Authority to curry favor with members of the party’s Central Committee.
Livnat said Tuesday that she rejected the comptroller’s findings and questi0ned her good faith.
ATTEMPT TO DELAY PUBLICATION
Yediot Achronot’s respected economics editor, Sever Plotzker, said the charges against Sharon’s ministry were the most serious he could recall in decades of comptroller’s reports. According to Plotzker, Sharon should step down.
Asked whether Sharon might have to quit, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir said Monday night, “I hope not.”
The repot is a grave embarrassment to Likud, especially in light of the governing party’s efforts to delay its publication until after the June 23 elections.
Livnat and other Likud figures sought to divert media attention to another section of the comptroller’s report that deals with massive waste at Agrexco, the government-owned agricultural export company which was headed by a Labor minister Avraham Katz-Oz, in the Likud-Labor unity government two years ago.
The comptroller also criticized the Housing Ministry’s handling of the immigrants’ needs on a professional basis.
She found there had been no agreement between the ministry and the Treasury on the ministry’s basic budget for 1991, for which she held the Treasury, too, partly to blame. The Housing Ministry exceeded its budget by $66 million, she wrote.
Ben-Porat was sharply critical of the way the Housing Ministry imported caravans and mobile homes in large numbers.
Many of the units were erected and left uninhabited for months; many were bought from substandard suppliers without adequate prior examination of their records.
The cost of erecting the mobile units exceeded the cost of constructing fixed buildings, the comptroller said.
ROOF OVER EVERY IMMIGRANT’S HEAD
As for fixed-building work, the report said much of it was substandard and had not withstood the recent winter storms. They were sited incorrectly, without proper planning and in some cases violated planning and zoning laws.
Sharon, while vowing there would be no cover-up of wrongdoing, reacted impatiently to the professional criticism. He told reporters his ministry had essentially done the “almost impossible,” considering that every immigrant and previously homeless Israeli now has a roof over his head.
But this success “disappointed” many people in Israel, he remarked, adding that some of the comptroller’s comments were themselves “unprofessional.”
While Sharon conceded that some of the contracts went to companies owned by Likud members, he said much of the work was contracted out to major building companies, such as Histadrut’s Solel Boneh and Shikun Ovdim.
The Kibbutz Ha’artzi construction company also won large contracts, he said.
He insisted, however, that Likud-owned companies were rightfully entitled to their share.
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.
