JERUSALEM — Food costs at the Israeli prime minister’s residence more than doubled after Benjamin Netanyahu took office in 2009, reaching nearly $120,000 in 2012, a third of it in takeout meals. The state paid about $2,000 a month to clean the Netanyahus’ private home in the seaside town of Caesaria, though the family spent most of its time in Jerusalem.
A report published on Tuesday by Israel’s state comptroller said that these and other expenses — including $68,000 over two years in makeup, hairstyling and “presentation” for Mr. Netanyahu and his wife, Sara — “strayed from the cornerstone principles of financial management and the principles of proportionality, reasonableness, saving and efficiency.”
Noting that Mrs. Netanyahu had reimbursed state coffers $1,035 after she was found to have pocketed the deposit money from recycled beverage bottles, the comptroller, Joseph Haim Shapira, said he had handed his investigative material over to the attorney general because it raised “suspicion of a criminal act.”
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“The average person who lives in Tel Aviv, who leans to the left, is flabbergasted and offended by it, but they were never going to vote for him,” Mr. Barak said. “For his voter base, which is going to be right of center, more religious, poorer population, they will concentrate on the fact that someone is trying to bring him down rather than what exactly is the content of what seems to be petty criminal activity.”
Myra Noveck, Irit Pazner Garshowitz and Gabby Sobelman contributed research.
