Labor Party leader Avi Gabbay
Gabbay: PM must have known of son's friendship with gas mogul's son
Labor Party leader says he finds it hard to believe Prime Minister Netanyahu wasn’t aware of his eldest son's relationship with the son of one of the main shareholders in the company that owns the Tamar gas field: 'They live in the same house and don’t discuss this stuff? I don’t buy it.'
Labor Party leader Avi Gabbay said Tuesday he found it hard to believe that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was unaware of his eldest son's friendship with the son of gas mogul Kobi Maimon, as was revealed in a recording
aired by Channel 2 News on Monday evening.
In the recording, Yair Netanyahu can be heard telling Ori Maimon: "Bro, my father cut a great deal for your father. Fought for it in the Knesset, bro. My father set you up with $20 billion, and you can't even hook me up with a show for NIS 400?"
The conversation was recorded sometime in 2015, when the country was embroiled in controversy surrounding the Israel's newly discovered natural gas deposits and the rights to drill there, partially owned by Maimon's company Isramco.
Avi Gabbay (R) and Yair Netanyahu. 'We still don’t know about the interests that led to this gas deal' (Photos: Amit Shabi, Motti Kimchi)
"I was familiar with the gas issue, I have an understanding of the negotiations and of the involved forces, but I just couldn’t understand why the prime minister was so eager to approve this deal," Gabbay told Ynet. "Today, hearing that his son's friend is the son of Kobi Maimon the tycoon, I say to myself, okay, this is the kind of thing we should have known about.
"Today, we still don’t know about the interests that led to this gas deal. There are things we don't know and I hope we'll know in the future. But one thing is clear: It was a huge move against the Israeli public.
"I asked the prime minister, 'Why are you doing this?' He had no answer. Just like (Finance Minister Moshe) Kahlon said he couldn’t get involved in the issue due to a conflict of interest, the prime minister should have said the same thing," the Labor leader stated.
Addressing Netanyahu's claim that he was unaware of his son's relationship with Maimon's son, Gabbay said: "I don't buy the story that while the prime minister is involved in the gas deal with an unexplained eagerness, his son has a friend who is Kobi Maimon's son and they don't talk about it. They live in the same house and they don’t discuss this stuff? I don't believe that story.
"The recordings are interested because of what we have learned about the gas deal and about this corruption," Gabbay added. "We are seeing one black stain after another on a deal which was black to begin with, in my opinion. We are seeing why we need a different leadership, why we morally need a different leadership."
Knesset approves supermarkets bill. 'A slap in the face of Likud voters' (Photo: Yoav Dudkevitch)
Moving on to the contentious supermarkets bill, which was passed into a law by the Knesset early Tuesday, the Labor leader said: "I think we are seeing a different opposition that the one we had two or three months ago. Like in soccer, we're keeping up the pressure and making the other side occasionally lose balls. That's what we can do."
Gabby said the legislation, which will give the interior minister authority to strike down municipal bylaws—including those permitting some businesses to open on Shabbat, was "a betrayal, a slap in the face of Likud voters.
"No one wants to force anything on anyone, and no one wants such things to be forced on them. So what we're doing is the best opposition we can do, and we're seeing results."
