Tel-Chai Nation

A new report reveals that Benny Gantz's failed tech firm led an improper business deal with local police:

That police acted improperly in their relations with prime ministerial candidate Benny Gantz’s former company, the Fifth Dimension, is a central allegation that emerges from a Wednesday report by the state comptroller.

Although the report never mentions Gantz or the Fifth Dimension by name, the timing and developments described regarding “Company A” in the report match up with Fifth Dimension’s business dealings with the police.

In February, Haaretz published a report that Fifth Dimension had gotten favored treatment from the police in a manner similar to some of the patterns described in the comptroller’s report in terms of being exempt from a competitive bidding process.

Joseph Shapira’s report mentions that “Company A” was given an unfair advantage when it got to be present during internal police meetings about whom to choose for the supplier role that Company A was competing for.

The police even granted Company A use of proprietary police technology at a discount to help it develop its solution, which the police wanted it to produce.

However, the report goes even further and accuses Company A of making misleading statements to the police, in order to win a NIS 4 million payment in 2016 to carry out a pilot project in the cyber-technology realm.

Gantz’s company eventually went bankrupt after the US sanctioned its main investor, a Russian tycoon linked to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

But it is even possible that Gantz’s company could have been paid NIS 50m. by the police, if his company had not gone bankrupt.

All of this raises questions about whether Fifth Dimension representatives made false statements to the police to try to win a multi-million shekel deal – and if they did, whether Gantz knew.

Confronted about whether the comptroller’s office actually had reviewed documents used by the Fifth Dimension to pitch the police in which false statements were made, the comptroller’s spokesman said that his office had no documents from Company A.

Rather, the state comptroller’s spokesman said that the allegations of false statements against Company A were based on an internal police document which itself said was based on Company A’s representations.

This disclosure raises the question as to whether Fifth Dimension – possibly with Gantz’s knowledge – made false representations to police, or whether officials within the police cooked up their own internal documents which they said were based on Fifth Dimension representations, even though Fifth Dimension might not have made the representations.

Most interesting indeed. It would seem Gantz's company was leading very unacceptable management of its affairs, and the police didn't do much better in their own finance department. This is certainly troubling, and another example of the shady affairs Gantz worked in.

Update: here's another report from Haaretz that reveals even more:

State Comptroller Joseph Shapira has found that the Israel Police violated regulations in awarding a project worth 50 million shekels ($13.7 million) to Fifth Dimension, a company at which Benny Gantz, the Kahol Lavan party leader, was chairman of the board at the time.

Shapira found that the job was awarded to Fifth Dimension without inviting bids from other suppliers, and in a report issued Wednesday, also said Fifth Dimension had had no prior experience to bid for the work and had provided false information to police representatives about the company's capabilities. The firm marketed an artificial intelligence system for law enforcement agencies to process intelligence information.

Shapira found that the Fifth Dimension informed the police that it had been in existence for four years when it was actually established just two years previously, that the company had a product ready for use, which was not the case, and that it had five other clients, all of which were security-related entities when in fact it had no other customers.

Doron Cohen, Fifth Dimension's former CEO, called the comptroller's conclusions "falsehoods and hallucinations" and added that if there had been any mistakes made in the matter, they were committed by the police.

As disclosed last month by Haaretz, the police paid 4 million shekels to carry out a pilot program even though ultimately the full project never came to fruition. Fifth Dimension was founded in 2014. Gantz, a former army chief of staff, was its chairman and Ram Ben-Barak, a former deputy head of the Mossad intelligence agency who is now running for the Knesset on the Kahol Lavan slate, was its president. The company ceased operations last year and its entire staff was laid off.

The Israel Police said in response that their purchases are always carried out in accordance to the law, and that they have studied the findings of the report and "will implement the matters it raises."

Gantz's party, Kahol Lavan, said in response that there was no wrongdoing on his behalf, stressing the report focuses on the Israel Police.

Oh, please. It's clear something's wrong with how they handled everything, and their inability to take responsibility, predictable as it is, is still very galling.

Labels: Israel, Knesset, Moonbattery, political corruption