The Knesset voted Monday afternoon on two candidates for state comptroller, backing the Likud’s candidate, Matanyahu Englman, by a wide majority.
The Likud had been concerned that prior to the vote, Haaretz reported, that Englman would fail to win the secret ballot, calling the Englman’s chances of winning “good” but “far from certain”.
Yet when the votes were tallied, Englman easily defeated the opposition’s candidate, former IDF Major General Giora Romm.
Despite the backing of Arab lawmakers, Romm received just 48 of the 120 votes in the Knesset, while Englman receive 67, while five blank ballots were cast.
Englman, who served as director-general of the Technion from 2014 to 2018, is the first state comptroller in three decades who did not previously serve as a judge. Before his term as director-general, Englman served as deputy director-general at the Technio from 2010 to 2014, and prior to that, was CEO of the town council for the community of Shoham in central Israel, deputy director-general of the Jerusalem College of Engineering, and managing director of the Jerusalem branch of the accounting firm Fahn Kanne & Co.