Israel Television Channel One reporter Ayala Chason reported on the evening Mabat news program that Prime Minister Olmert's office is pushing to help a cellular phone business owned in part by Tarek Abbas, the son of Mahmoud Abbas. The cellular phone company, that is mostly owned by
Kuwaitis, has already invested hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure to provideservice that would compete against the existing Palestinian mobile phone company - but it has yet to be assigned communication frequencies.
Israeli security officials oppose assigning these frequencies to any company on security grounds and in fact have also prevented an Israeli company from
getting them.
DM Barak, ISA (Shabbak) head Yuval Diskin and the Minister of Communication
all oppose granting the frequencies to the company partially owned by Tarek
Abbas but in recent days the Prime Minister's Office has been pushing for
such a move.
The Prime Minister's Office responded to Chason that they never knew of the
family connection between Mahmoud Abbas and the deal.
The Ministry of Defense followed up on this response by noting to Chason that the family connection had been mentioned at every meeting they have held on the matter.
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