On May 3, 2026, head of National Fraud Investigations Unit of the Israeli police and deputy commissioner Eli Makmal, announced that he had decided to close the case concerning the sale of the Pegasus spyware system by the Israeli company NSO Group to Ghana, citing a lack of evidentiary basis for opening a criminal investigation and deciding not to investigate any Israeli involved in the affair.The decision came roughly six years after Ghana’s Supreme Court convicted officials on corruption charges connected to the Pegasus deal, and about four years after we – a group of Israeli human rights activists – submitted a formal request calling for a criminal investigation in Israel.On May 12, 2020, Ghana’s Supreme Court convicted three officials and sentenced them to prison after ruling that they had caused the state to lose $4 million through a deal to purchase the Pegasus spyware system for the National Communications Authority (NCA). According to the ruling, the officials violated local law by independently contracting with NSO through a third party – a company called Infralocks Development Ltd. (IDL) – without approval from the relevant authorities. They were convicted of violating procurement laws and conspiring to steal and launder public funds. One of the officials personally profited $200,000 from the deal.In our request for an investigation, we argued that the legal proceedings in Ghana provided more than sufficient evidence that NSO, along with officials in Israel’s defense and foreign ministries who approved the deal, had become entangled in a corruption scandal. We further explained that documents disclosed during the proceedings – particularly the signed contracts – raised substantial suspicions regarding the Israeli parties’ awareness of what was taking place and suggested that the transaction had been structured in a manner that facilitated bribery.One major warning sign was the role of IDL. The intermediary company did not merely facilitate the deal and collect a commission; the entire agreement was signed exclusively with it. The contracts offered no explanation as to why NSO and the Israeli authorities who approved the export of Pegasus did not insist that the agreement be signed directly with the Ghanaian public authority, the NCA.Neither NSO nor the Israeli authorities conditioned the export license on IDL presenting official authorisation from the competent Ghanaian authorities confirming both the legality of the deal itself and the legality of transferring payments to NSO through IDL.Instead, NSO and the approving authorities in Israel’s defense and foreign ministries were satisfied with the fact that IDL had signed a parallel contract with the director general of the NCA, without independently verifying whether the contracts were lawful under Ghanaian law or whether the signatories were authorised to approve them. The contracts also placed responsibility on IDL for conducting due diligence regarding the deal’s compliance with Ghanaian law. Clauses in the agreement between NSO and IDL defined IDL’s responsibility for preventing corruption, bribery and human rights violations connected to the transaction. Rather than conducting these checks themselves, NSO and the Israeli ministries shifted the responsibility onto the local intermediary company.Another major warning sign emerged from the fact that, according to both Ghana’s Supreme Court ruling and an investigation by Israeli journalist Haim Rivlin for Channel 13 News, the Pegasus system was shipped and installed by NSO technicians at an address in Ghana that was not the official premises of the NCA, but rather a safe house owned by a national security adviser who was politically close to the president at the time.The payment structure also raised serious concerns. Funds for the deal were transferred from the NCA to IDL’s bank account and only then to NSO, rather than being transferred directly from the NCA to NSO, with NSO itself paying the intermediary’s commission. In most defense export deals, the Israeli company seeking the contract pays the broker’s fee. Here, however, the client – the NCA –paid IDL’s commission, creating a structure that enabled the diversion of public funds.According to Ghana’s Supreme Court ruling, NSO was fully aware that payments would be transferred through IDL and that, apart from $1 million, obstacles had arisen in transferring the remaining funds, which were being held in IDL’s bank account. An NSO employee identified as “Naor” contacted the bank in Ghana and unsuccessfully attempted to resolve the issue.When Rivlin approached an NSO spokesperson regarding the revelations, the company initially claimed that it had “never operated systems in Ghana.” After NSO realised that Channel 13 possessed video documentation of the system installed in the safe house, as well as travel records of company technicians who had visited Ghana to install it, the company revised its response.“The sequence of events in Ghana clearly demonstrates the implementation of the company’s strict ethics and human rights policy,” NSO said. “After receiving all legally required permits, the company installed the technical equipment in Ghana, without activating it. Several months later, during customer training, significant concerns were raised by the Israeli training team regarding ethics and Ghana’s intended future use of the system. Following an internal review, an exceptional decision was made not to allow the customer to activate the system.”Yet Ghana’s Supreme Court ruling makes clear that even after NSO realised there were problems transferring the remaining payments to its account, and even after learning that its system had been installed in a private residence, neither the company nor the Israeli authorities reported their concerns to Ghanaian authorities.We argued in our request for an investigation that NSO’s decision to halt its services appears to have stemmed from the suspension of the remaining payments. Because neither NSO nor Israel’s defense and foreign ministries chose to file a complaint on their own initiative, the impression was created that they preferred to avoid any investigation into the transaction.Our request for an investigation was based on Amendment No. 99 to Israel’s Penal Code, enacted in 2008, which introduced Section 291A criminalising the bribery of foreign public officials. The amendment was part of Israel’s accession to anti-corruption conventions led by the United Nations and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).It was only in 2016 that an Israeli company was first convicted in Israel under the law for bribing a public official in the Kingdom of Lesotho. The company had hired a local agent with ties to the kingdom’s then-director general of the Interior Ministry and agreed to transfer benefits to him, through the intermediary, in exchange for advancing its business interests.In response to a freedom of information request that I submitted, Israeli police disclosed that between 2018 and 2023, 12 investigations had been opened on suspicion of bribing foreign public officials. But since the Lesotho case, no indictments have been filed.Diplomatic cables preserved in the Israeli State Archives from the 1960s through the 1980s reveal that, with the approval of the relevant political and legal authorities in Israel, the country’s foreign ministry bribed elected officials and public servants in African countries. Israeli diplomats physically delivered envelopes filled with cash, and the ministry also mediated bribery deals involving both private and state-owned Israeli companies. Official cables noted that because the bribery had been authorised, Israeli government companies recorded the payments in their accounting books and official reports.In recent decades, Israel has invested major efforts in joining and integrating into the OECD, cooperating closely with the organisation and implementing reforms in line with many of its recommendations. Given the importance Israel places on its OECD membership, and despite the rarity of criminal investigations involving defense companies, we believed that this time – following convictions in a country like Ghana, where corruption is widespread and law enforcement institutions are comparatively weak – at the very least a parallel investigation might be opened in Israel, even if no indictment were ultimately filed.This week, we filed an appeal against the decision not to open a criminal investigation in Israel. We argued that, in light of the legal proceedings in Ghana and their findings, there was sufficient evidence to warrant an investigation, and that the police could not reasonably determine whether the elements of the suspected offenses had been met – or whether those involved were aware of their actions – without opening a criminal investigation and questioning all the Israelis involved.Ghana never demanded Israeli authorities to open a criminal investigation. Recently, Israel’s ambassador to Ghana, Roey Gilad, said in an interview with JoyNews that despite developments in West Asia and Israel’s refusal to support the declaration of transatlantic slave trade as the gravest crime, the two countries continue to enjoy strong diplomatic and people-to-people relations. Neither country appears to have an interest in opening the Pandora’s box of the Pegasus affair. It is more convenient to treat the episode as a local corruption scandal in Ghana that was handled locally – especially if Ghana intends to continue purchasing surveillance systems and other military equipment and services from Israel.Eitay Mack is an Israeli lawyer and human rights activist.