A $2 million bacchanal is hardly the traditional way to observe the Jewish “festival of lights.” But Gaydamak has no patience for stodgy ritual, and the 54-year-old Moscow-born financier is just about the only one in Israel who feels like celebrating. After last summer’s punishing war with Hizbullah and a rash of political scandals this winter, Israelis are fed up with their current crop of leaders. Military Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz has resigned after a series of investigations found that his forces had mishandled the Lebanon war. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert faces 14 percent approval ratings–and now a criminal investigation into his role in the sale of one of Israel’s largest banks while he was Finance minister. One of his top aides has already been placed under house arrest in a fraud investigation involving the state’s Tax Authority. (Both Olmert and his aides deny any wrong-doing.) A recent poll by Israel’s Dahaf Institute found that 85 percent of Israelis considered their political leaders to be corrupt. “There’s a [power] vacuum,” says Shlomo Avineri, a political scientist at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University. “And that’s when these sorts of oligarchs step in.”
Gaydamak styles himself as a sort of Israeli Ross Perot–an eccentric electoral outsider with the bank account and business acumen to fill the gap. During last summer’s war, Gaydamak paid about $14 million to house 6,000 Israeli refugees in two tent cities along the Mediterranean. In November he sent 2,000 residents of Sderot, an Israeli village near the Gaza border that has been hammered by rocket attacks, for a weeklong vacation at a Red Sea beach resort. Critics view Gaydamak as more of a Citizen Kane–an awkward tycoon desperately trying to buy friends and build a political base. “Give me three months, and half the Knesset will be mine,” Gaydamak told the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot late last year. A poll last year in the same newspaper predicted that a party led by Gaydamak could win eight out of 120 Knesset seats in a snap election–enough to make him a behind-the-scenes kingmaker. (Gaydamak tells NEWSWEEK he has no current plans to run for office.)
His past could be a problem. After emigrating from the Soviet Union in 1972, Gaydamak built a fortune on oil deals and the Russian stock market. In 2000 he relocated to Israel from France, where he is wanted for alleged tax evasion. (He denies any impropriety.) A 2002 study by the nonprofit Center for Public Integrity in Washington, D.C., concluded that Gaydamak “epitomized the business of war in the post-Cold War era–an entrepreneur with global ties to arms smuggling, resource exploitation and private military companies.” For his part, Gaydamak says: “I was never involved in any arms sales, deals–nothing. It’s a complete lie.”
Despite his political liabilities, mainstream politicians aren’t taking chances. Earlier this month a Knesset committee debated a measure nicknamed the “anti-Gaydamak law,” which would require any candidate to count large philanthropic gifts as campaign expenses, making them subject to spending limits already on the books. Still, even the measure’s author, Ran Cohen, doubts it will ever become law. “He has enough money to buy other politicians,” says Cohen. “I’m not sure I’ll win.”
To many Israelis, Gaydamak’s murky reputation outweighs his apparently good intentions. Mordechai Eleasi, a 38-year-old Sderot resident, spent a weekend this past November relaxing with his wife and three kids at a luxury hotel in Eilat on the tycoon’s tab. But Eleasi says he has no intention of voting for Gaydamak. “He’s a nice guy, we thank him, but that’s all,” says Eleasi, with the cool indifference of an underwhelmed prom date. “I never really thought about him as anything more than that.” Gaydamak’s money can buy influence, gratitude–possibly even votes. It still can’t buy love.
