Sources inform ''Globes'' that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is strengthening the advisory committee of the National Economics Council, ahead of the drawing up of the economic plans and 2013 stage budget, which will be one of the harshest Israel has known in a decade.
Netanyahu has strengthened the advisory committee, which has previously played a decisive role in setting economic policy, both in terms of the size of its staff, and in terms of the areas it covers, including the budget, education, higher education, employment, welfare, finance, high tech, and minorities.
It should be pointed out that whereas the National Economics Council, headed by Prof. Eugene Kandell, is a government agency subject to the Civil Service Commission, the advisory committee comprises top officials from various public fields, most of whom are not public servants. The committee's newest members include former Ministry of Finance budget director Kobi Haber, who is currently a VP at Bank Leumi; former Ministry of Finance director general Uri Shani, who resigned after frontal disputes with Minister of Finance Yuval Steinitz; Bank Hapoalim deputy CEO Anat Levin; former National Labor Court President Steve Adler; and former National Insurance Institute director general Esther Dominici, who currently serves as director of Hadassah Medical Organization in Jerusalem.
Other new members of the advisory council include Prof. Assaf Hamdani, an expert on corporate law; EMC VP and EMC Israel Center of Excellence general manager Dr. Orna Berry, a former chief scientist; former Manufacturers Association president Oded Tyrah; Adina Bar-Shalom, the daughter of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef and founder the Haredi College of Jerusalem; and Prisoner Rehabilitation Authority chairman Dr. Malek Amror.
The advisory council's current members are still in place: Prof. Manuel Trajtenberg, who chaired the Committee for Social-Economic Change; Dr. Michael Hemo-Lotem, director of the JDC-ELKA Institute for Leadership and Governance; Yair Hamburger, an owner of Harel Insurance Investments and Financial Services Ltd. (TASE: HARL); Erez Vinograd, the president and CEO of Makhteshim Agan Industries Ltd.; and Prof. Ben Zion Zilberfarb, a former director general of the Ministry of Finance. No new chairman has been appointed for the advisory council since Ori Yogev resigned 18 months ago.
Prime Minister's Office, Treasury at loggerheads
The timing of the strengthening of the advisory committee is not a coincidence. Netanyahu is struggling to draw up an economic plan for 2013, which will have to include a long list of painful tax hikes, amounting to at least NIS 10 billion and budget cuts, totaling NIS 12 billion. At the same time, relations between top officials at the Prime Minister Office and the Ministry of Finance are at an all-time low, because of mutual recriminations about the failure to schedule budget meetings (by the Ministry of Minister of Finance) and unprofessional internal squabbling (by the Prime Minister's Office).
Even though the advisory committee is a fairly new body, and has not won extensive coverage, it played a key rose in the writing of the last two state budgets, including the 2009-10 budget, when Yogev, a close associate of Netanyahu and a former budget director, held a key role in preparing the budget and choosing budget cuts.
According to Ram Belinkov, the budget director at the time and who demonstratively resigned when the budget was passed, Haber, who joined Netanyahu's team today, also played an important behind-the-scene's role in drawing up that budget.
Therefore, it cannot be ruled out that, this time too, under the current circumstances, Netanyahu will use his newly recruited big guns such as Haber, Shani and Trajtenberg (the latter two who have particularly poor relations with Steinitz) - who are very experienced in formulating economic policy to draw up a budget proposal to his liking.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on July 24, 2012
© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd. 2012