After a two-month filibuster by the opposition on the Knesset Finance Committee, the committee today voted on all the objections filed on Minister of Finance Yair Lapid's 0% VAT bill. The committee is expected to discuss the cost of the law next week, after Lapid announced in a Channel 2 TV interview last night that the cost was less than the estimated NIS 1.3 billion attributed to the bill, not triple that amount, as asserted by professional and Finance Ministry sources. Sources in Lapid's entourage said that the minister had been confused and had made a mistake by saying that the bill's cost would be NIS 1.3 billion in 2014, when the bill has no cost. They said that the bill would cost NIS 2.5 billion in 2015, assuming that the maximum number of apartment purchasers take advantage of it.
The decision to call off the filibuster and hold all the votes on the objections was taken following a compromise between MK Moshe Gafni (United Torah Judaism) and committee chairman MK Nissan Slomiansky (Jewish Home). In return for agreeing to shorten the approval process for the bill, the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) MKs asked that the Finance Ministry professional echelon be invited to the committee and confronted with what Lapid had said: that the cost of the bill in the 2015 budget would be NIS 1.3 billion.
Now, after all the votes on the objections to and revisions of the bill have been voted on, the committee is expected to convene and discuss the proposals and amendments for the bill. Slomiansky asked Knesset House Committee chairman and coalition chairman MK Yariv Levin to convene the committee next week to approve the final bill, and the ball is now in Levin's court, who will not act without instructions from the prime minister. This in effect puts the decision back in the hands of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Lapid, who have not reached agreement on the bill.
After today's votes in the committee, Gafni said, "We're continuing parliamentary action to prevent the bill from passing by means of a filibuster and thorough discussion in the Knesset House Committee. After that, we'll continue the debate for many weeks in the Knesset plenum. We'll use every possible parliamentary measure to stop this bad bill by the Finance Minister, which will waste billions of shekels."
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on September 15, 2014
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