Q. In Israel?
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A. No but typically in terms of the right venue would have been people who have seen where we were in Israel, it was important for our business interest in Israel to be known to the world that we were in fact not walking away from the deal, we
were prepared to proceed.
יש לציין כי איש מאותם אנשים שלטענת מר לייפסיק פנו אליו בעניין זה לא הוזמן לעדות, והוא אף לא נקב בשמותיהם. ובהמשך הוסיף והעיד מר לייפסיק:
Q. But there are legal, you are doing this when you have the legal proceeding going on, the arbitration going on in New York, so if you believe that you are right, you should wait until the end of the arbitration and that’s said we won. But during the arbitration to, look, Israel is very small country, you don’t have businesses here prior to the Jerusalem Post, why do you care? I mean why spend money on what the Israeli public might think or might read in the newspaper while the proceedings are going on, and they will have an ending this way or another.?
A. Well we have the Asper foundation, the Asper family had done business in Israel before, they had made an attempt to buy channel 2 before, they have a variety of business parties that they were engaged with from time to time, the Asper family that’s the controlling share holder of CanWest had 4 or 5 philanthropic enterprises in Israel, I refer to them in affidavits the Asper foundation had a number of community action centers they had been supporting a number of endeavors to establish the … center.
Q. But, ok but having,
A. Our reputation was important…
Q. Lets say that this is all correct and there are philanthropic enterprises going on in Israel, it doesn’t have any connection, you can have, you can be very philanthropic and break a contract, ...
A. It was also your honor a reaction to an article that had appeared very early on in the proceedings there was an article that appeared in Haaretz in January the 26th.
Q.Yeah נ/6, אוקי.
A. Where it was reported that CanWest was reneging on the deal that it had walked away and was not prepared to proceed it also made a reference that CanWest was going to take an editorial direction to the paper to turn it into a hard right newspaper. It also suggested that we were out to fire the editor who, by the name of David Horowitz and this appeared in the newspaper and it became apparent to us that there was going to be media attention to these proceedings, and we felt it was important that the other side of the story should have equal treatment.