WEST BANK (Dispatches) – Sara Netanyahu, wife of Zionist Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, reportedly asked former communications ministry director Gen. Shlomo ‘Momo’ Filber to slow down regulatory assistance to the Elovitch family, owners of the popular Israeli Walla! news portal, owing to its unfavorable coverage of her and the prime minister, a leak of an interrogation transcript seen by The Times of Israel appears to indicate.
According to the newspaper, in the transcript, Nir Hefetz, former aide to the prime minister and witness in one of the cases against the Netanyahus, said that Mrs. Netanyahu had asked him to slow down efforts to assist the Elovitch family and their company Bezeq, a major Israeli telecommunications firm in which the Elovitch family has a controlling interest.
"There was a meeting outside Momo’s house where I told him that Sara asked that he not go forward too fast, that he not run with the issues of Shaul Elovitch, and that was because of the Netanyahu family’s disappointment with the way the Walla! Site was portraying them,” Hefetz told authorities.
"In one of our meetings she told me, ‘tell Momo not to help Shaul so much’. One general sentence, and you have to say, to Netanyahu’s credit, that he always emphasized that in any situation where Sara says something, it has to go through him. You don’t do it unless you get his permission. I assume that Momo had similar instruction, but after she asked me, I passed on her request to Momo,” he added.
According to Hefetz, Sara had told him that as a member of the "inner circle,” Shlomo ‘Momo’ Filber would stop helping Bezeq after being asked. "I don’t recall her exact words, but the message was clear: Stop helping Elovitch in the communications ministry issues. It was unequivocal,” he said.
Late last month, a separate batch of transcripts in Case 4000 released to the media, Sara Netanyahu was quoted as saying that if she had "the option to take down something negative and untrue,” she was "allowed to scream for my life and say that something is wrong and negative. Just check, everything they [Walla!] say about me is a lie. Human dignity and freedom is being trampled on. I’m being trampled on like a cockroach.”