Banking sources predicted Sunday that the entire Board of Directors of Bank Leumi, Israel’s largest bank, may soon resign or be forced to resign.
One Board member, Amnon Goldenberg, a prominent lawyer, announced his resignation over the weekend and others are expected to quit in the wake of mounting protests over the excessive severance pay and pension awarded the bank’s former chairman, Ernst Japhet.
Japhet stepped down last spring after a commission of inquiry found him and the heads of Israel’s four other largest banks culpable in the 1983 bank shares scandal. Japhet was awarded $4.5 million in severance pay and a $30,000 a month pension.
The Board, at a special meeting last Thursday, agreed that the payments were unseemly. Leon Dulzin, Governor of the bank, but not a Board member, said he ordered the pension suspended. The severance payment had already been made.
Bank Leumi employes staged a one-day strike Friday to protest the deal. Hillel Arbel of the employes committee said Japhet should return the money.
Japhet, meanwhile, left for New York Sunday on private business. He told reporters at Ben Gurion Airport that he was not fleeing and would be back. But the banking tycoon has troubles on another front. His former wife Ella, whom he divorced five years ago, filed suit in Tel Aviv District Court last week for higher maintenance payments. The court promptly attached half of Japhet’s assets.
Ella Japhet told the court that her former husband cut her maintenance payments after his resignation from the Bank Leumi on grounds that he was no longer a bank executive but only a “pensioner.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
