Following an appeal by the Movement for Freedom of Information in Israel, the expenses of the Prime Minister's residences for 2022, which concerns the period when Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid served as Prime Minister, were made public on Sunday morning.
The report shows that the budget for 2022 stood at 743,215 shekels, of which 471,419 shekels were intended for the expenses of Prime Minister Bennett's home in Ra'anana.
The report also shows that, in 2022, the Prime Minister's Office was not asked to take part in the expenses of former Prime Minister Yair Lapid's private residence, with the exception of expenses for security purposes.
In an apartment rented for Lapid near the Prime Minister’s official residence, the Prime Minister's Office spent 56,574 shekels over six months, the data show.
This is a dramatic decrease in the expenses of the Prime Minister's homes – both official and private – compared to the years when Benjamin Netanyahu served as Prime Minister. In 2021 - when Netanyahu served as Prime Minister until July 10, 2021 - the Prime Minister's Office spent 1,430,310 shekels on the official residence on Balfour Street in Jerusalem and another 239,723 shekels for the expenses of Netanyahu's private residence in Caesarea.
In 2020, the Prime Minister's Office spent 1,577,000 shekels on the official residence in Balfour and another 276,000 shekels on Netanyahu's private home in Caesarea.
Attorney Racheli Edri, CEO of the Movement for Freedom of Information in Israel, said, "After a decade of high expenses that reached millions of shekels, funded by the Israeli public, for the first time the expenses of the Prime Minister's residence amounted to less than one million shekels. In addition, it appears that former Prime Minister Yair Lapid was satisfied with financing his public expenses, without requesting reimbursement for private expenses. What this means is that the transparency promoted by the Movement for Freedom of Information, with the goal of creating a norm of separation between public and private expenditures, helps to protect the public coffers."