Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich at the OECD conference in Paris (Photo: Finance Ministry Spokesperson's Office)
Yesterday morning, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich boarded a plane to France to attend an OECD conference in Paris. This was a conference that his two predecessors, Israel Katz and Avigdor Lieberman, chose to skip, and did not consider their personal presence at the event important.
Smotrich chose to fly – and that, of course, is his right. But since we take the Minister of Finance seriously, we carefully read the announcement he issued before he left Israel, in which he declared that the purpose of the visit was to strengthen cooperation between Israel and the organization and its member states. "On the sidelines of the conference," said a press release issued by his office, "he will hold meetings with international companies and local investors interested in entering the Israeli market, as part of the effort to lower the cost of living."
Dana Koren, one of Alstom's senior officials, with whom the finance minister met in Paris. According to her business profile, she lives in the Tel Aviv area (Photo: screenshot, LinkedIn website)
Against the background of the sharp rise in prices in recent months, it sounds necessary for the Minister of Finance to vacate his many occupations in Israel in order to assist in the effort to assist in the national effort.
However, it turns out that, as in his previous visit to Paris, in which government representatives and senior local businessmen refrained from meeting with him, this time too he is not overly popular, not to mention that the level with which he holds work meetings is low, and above all, he has nothing to do with the war on the cost of living.
As soon as he landed in Paris, Smotrich rushed to a first meeting with "French and international companies, with the aim of bringing more companies to Israel to open the market and lower the cost of living, led by the Israel-France Chamber of Commerce," according to the announcement that immediately followed.
An examination conducted by Walla!, with the help of an experienced high-tech CEO, who has often organized such meetings in France, shows that most of the participants in the discussion were lawyers and accountants.
The honor of those in their place rests, of course, but these are not exactly the most senior managers: "How can there be a single serious company on this list that is relevant to the cost of living or supports the growth of high-tech or the Israeli economy? Most of them are made up of legal advisers, accountants and investment advisers of banks, who are undoubtedly respectable people (and almost all of them are also Jews with a warm Zionist heart), but they are middlemen and unable to bring huge investments to Israel." The same source told us.
What is more, there was a representative office for the international French corporation ALSTOM, which manufactures high-speed trains (acquired the company "Bombardier for $ 6.7 billion"), signaling equipment and infrastructure, equipment for the production of hydroelectric and nuclear energy. It's already serious – a meeting with senior executives of a railway company, in a country that suffers from severe communication problems? Very logical.
However, it turns out that the two representatives of the company, who attended the meeting, according to the list of participants published by the Minister of Finance himself, are Dana Koren and Ariel Dichi, who work at the company's local representative office in Israel and live in Israel – and therefore did not have to fly all the way to Paris to meet with the minister, instead of meeting him in his office or in a café in Israel.
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Alstom representative Ariel Dici, also - according to his profile on the business network, lives in Tel Aviv (screenshot, LinkedIn website)
Even in his meetings with colleagues in the OECD, Smotrich was not a huge success, to say the least.
Although he participated in the organization's main plenary session (with several hundred other people) and met with the organization's secretary-general, he managed to speak privately with the following list of officials:
Colombia's national planning minister, Costa Rica's foreign trade minister, and Singapore's minister of transportation and trade. All of them, presumably, are worthy and respectable people, but not exactly economic tiebreakers or decisive factors in the effort to promote Israeli industry or increase the cost of living.
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