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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........

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