Opinion | The capital market is built on trust, which is being undermined these days Israel today

Businessman Alfred Akirov employed Shula Zaken, head of the office of accused Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, for two years, until April 2014. The suspicion that arose was that her employment with Alrov was Olmert's way of paying her silence fees, through friends. When it did not go well, she was fired.

It could have been less troublesome if it had been a private company employment. Now that Akirov is trying to take over the insurance company at all, it is impossible not to recall this case and cases of previous "deals" in which CEOs of large banks were replaced.

In retrospect, the Supervisor of Banks asked to intervene in the process, but it was too late. Our shekels, the "public asset portfolio" entrusted to banks and insurance companies, are at stake, with the danger of centralization once again hovering over the capital markets.

We have seen the end of the realization of this danger in the case of Shlomo Eliyahu. He did not receive a permit to control Leumi from the Bank of Israel, but miraculously received a permit from the then Supervisor of Insurance, Oded Sarig, to purchase Insurance Tower, even though he was known to gamble big money in London. He was even fined by the tax authorities for spending large sums of money without reporting and approval. Since the public and regulators eat bitterly from it - it acts as hard as it can, it has replaced seven CEOs and chairmen and undermined financial stability. It should be noted that in ordinary companies it is not possible to gain control over most of their shares (51%) Only the financial institutions manage a huge amount of capital that does not belong to them, so Akirov, with less than a billion shekels, will be able to control a quarter of a trillion shekels (250 million). Has already been recruited from the institutions, so he plans to use the public pensions to gain control of them.

In recent days, the Supervisor of the Capital Market has imposed a large financial sanction on the Shirbit company, after determining that it did not act as required to prevent the cyber attack on it.

In this case, too, large failures of market stakeholders may become apparent in retrospect.

But this creation of centralization is, first and foremost, a creation of the supervisors themselves, and precisely they do not tend to take responsibility for it. Alfred Akirov

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