State Comptroller Matanyahu Englman’s office released a report Tuesday on the financial obligations and reports of Israel’s political parties in 2024, finding wrongdoing on the part of the ruling Likud party and the opposition’s Labor.

The ombudsman decided to penalize the two parties by deducting sums that would otherwise have come to them as regular state funding given to Knesset factions.

Likud was docked  NIS 150,000 ($53,000) for receiving party dues that didn’t meet the legal requirements, and for failing to provide proof of payment for extra payments and bonuses given to various administrative officials based on unwritten agreements.

The report found that there was insufficient oversight over membership fees in a way that failed to guarantee the authentication of each member’s identity and payment method. Over 40 percent of credit cards and bank accounts used to pay these dues — some 16,000 credit cards and 13,000 bank accounts — were each used for the membership fees of more than one person, and in about a quarter of these cases, the members had different family names and apparently weren’t from the same household.

The report said this raised the suspicion that membership fees are routinely paid for by others, a situation it characterized as “grave” since it could skew the........

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