Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: perche' e come cambiera' Israele

detto molto brevemente - diventera' un Paese esportatore di energia.
Serve altro, per capire come mai i palestinesi vogliono andarci
d'accordo?
Per quanto riguarda il resto - ovvero la brutta campagna contro
Sheshinski - ecco qua un ottimo articolo del Jerusalem Report.
EYTAN SHESHINSKI IS finally beginning to feel some relief. Nine
grueling months after he was tapped to head a government-appointed
committee studying Israel’s fiscal policy with respect to royalties
and taxes from oil and gas fields, Sheshinski, professor emeritus of
public finance at the Hebrew University, has good cause to feel
vindicated.
His committee’s recommendations, whose bottom line calls for
increasing the overall government take from oil and gas fields from 25
percent to a sliding scale ranging from 50 percent to 62 percent, has
been strongly supported by top-level financial officials in the
country, including Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz, Bank of Israel
Governor Stanley Fischer, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
himself.
Netanyahu’s government has voted in favor of adopting the Sheshinski
Committee’s recommendations as the basis for new legislation, which is
currently being debated in a Knesset committee prior to a vote in the
full plenum.
But Sheshinski has paid a high personal price. Both he and his
committee were the targets of an ugly public smear campaign, one of
the worst Israel has ever seen. Full-page newspaper advertisements –
many with no outwardly identifiable source – regularly pilloried the
committee.
Demonstrators camped outside Sheshinski’s home in Jerusalem’s Yemin
Moshe neighborhood, loudly accusing him of being an “Arab
lover” (apparently an insinuation that by increasing taxes on natural
gas production, Sheshinski intended to make domestic gas production
unprofitable, thus forcing the country to buy gas from Egypt instead).
He and his family were harassed by frivolous law suits and rattled by
death threats.
Lobbyists for the energy companies that discovered large natural gas
findings off the coast of Israel put intense pressure on public
figures, government ministers and Knesset Members to reject the
committee’s recommendations.
“What we saw happening here goes beyond distressing. It is appalling,”
says Daniel Doron, director of the Israel Center for Social and
Economic Progress (ICSEP), a pro-market public-policy think tank. “The
power wielded by tycoons in our society is simply perverting public
discourse, and clearly harming the economy.”
“The fabric of democracy has been shown to be fragile,” laments Daniel
Gutwein, professor of history at Haifa University. “This was no less
than a tear in that fabric, and the threat here is clear and
alarming.”
“IN A LAW-ABIDING DEMOCRAcy, it is certainly legitimate for everyone
to have free expression, even if that expression is of anger or rage,”
Sheshinski tells The Report. “But there has to be a measure of
proportionality. From my position as head of the committee, I saw an
asymmetry between wealthy interests and the authorities. This
asymmetry may pose a danger to the balance of power. And that raises
some very serious questions.”
Behind his calm demeanor, the professor has piercing hazel-colored
eyes that fix a firm and determined gaze forward when he defends the
committee’s months of work. “It is not only the right of the state to
increase the government take from oil and gas production, it is its
duty to do so,” he says emphatically. “If anything, we were too
lenient with the energy companies in our final recommendations.”
Sheshinski, 73, has enjoyed a long career as one of the world’s
leading experts on public financing, privatization and taxation.
He completed a PhD in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology in 1966, and, in addition to his permanent position at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he has been a visiting professor at a
long list of prestigious institutions, including Princeton, Harvard,
MIT, Columbia and Stanford. As an emeritus professor, he is a member
of the Hebrew University’s Center for the Study of Rationality.
In the private sphere, Sheshinski has served as chairman of the Board
of Directors of Koor Industries and is a member of the board at the
Discount Bank and the Psagot-Ofek Investment House. In public service,
he has, among other positions, been an economic consultant to the
Knesset, consultant on welfare policy to the Prime Minister’s Office,
and chairman of a committee of experts on tax reform.
But even this extensive résumé did not fully prepare him for the
ordeal. “When we first began our deliberations, I told the members of
the committee that if we find that the government take in Israel from
natural resource drilling places is ‘somewhere in the middle of the
pack’ relative to the rates taken by countries around the world, we
should leave things as they are,” Sheshinski tells The Report. “What
we did insist on was proportionality. And it turned out that things
here were very far from being proportional.”
OVER A DECADE AGO, A UNITED States Geological Survey report concluded
that there were significant signs of structures – meaning deep wells –
containing natural gas and petroleum in the eastern Mediterranean.
Energy companies began to take the idea of intensive exploration off
the coast of Israel seriously.
This had long been advocated by geologist Joseph Langotsky, whose
theories had once been met with ridicule.
A consortium led by Houston-based Noble Energy struck its first
jackpot in 2009 in a natural gas field called Tamar, named after
Langotsky’s daughter, located at a depth of 16,000 feet (4,800 meters)
some 80 kilometers (50 miles) off the coast of Haifa.
Tamar’s reserves of natural gas, which Noble Energy estimates at 238
billion cubic meters, were considered a major, gamechanging find at
the time.
But even this was soon overshadowed by yet another field drilled by
the Noble consortium, aptly named Leviathan. Leviathan, about 80 miles
offshore and 29 miles southwest of Tamar, holds a gross mean of 450
billion cubic meters of gas, according to Noble Energy.
Noble holds a 39.66 percent interest in the consortium, with Isramco
Negev 2 holding 28.75 percent, Delek Drilling 22.67 percent, Avner Oil
Exploration 22.67 percent, and Ratio Oil Exploration rounding out the
holdings with 15 percent. Ratio Oil began a handful of years ago as a
start-up, employed five people, and was worth less than $500,000; its
market value today exceeds $1 billion.
Taken together, the two natural gas field finds, the largest in the
world in the past decade, contain a staggering amount of energy
reserves. The quantity of gas is so great that the fields will not
only supply Israel’s domestic needs for decades – they will catapult
Israel onto the list of energy exporting nations, a development with
far-reaching implications. Leviathan alone has been estimated as
containing $80 billion to $90 billion worth of resources. The United
States Geological Survey’s latest estimates of oil and gas reservoirs
in the eastern Mediterranean, from March of last year, indicate that
there may be as much as $300 billion worth of natural resources within
Israel’s territorial waters.
With those kinds of numbers, it should come as no surprise that the
government quickly became interested in the potential state revenues.
But to the dismay of the tax authorities, the existing law governing
natural resource taxes and royalties in Israel, the Petroleum Law, was
an antiquated piece of legislation dating to 1952. Over the years,
attempts to update the law, most recently in 2002, never managed to
obtain Knesset approval.
The Sheshinski Committee, formally named “the Committee to Examine the
Fiscal Policy on Oil and Gas Resources in Israel,” was appointed in
April 2010. It was charged with conducting an in-depth examination of
the oil and gas exploration market in Israel and around the world –
particularly the natural gas market – and providing the government
with recommendations. The committee submitted its interim report on
November 15, 2010 and its final report on January 3, 2011.
ALL NATURAL RESOURCES ARE always the sole property of the state, but
to encourage the private sector to explore for resources, the state
issues drilling licenses that, according to law, can grant those who
strike oil or natural gas tremendous profits. An initial permit is
issued for 18 months. If the holder of the permit is satisfied that
sufficiently positive indications have been found, the permit may be
upgraded to a three-year license. If a discovery is subsequently
proven, 30-year exclusive mining rights are issued to the license
holder; these may be renewed even further if the natural gas or
petroleum field continues to yield usable resources.
The permits, however, are not issued by competitive tender. All a
company needs to do is present a reasonably professional work plan for
drilling a particular location to the regulating authority. The fee
for obtaining an initial permit is only a few thousand shekels.
Contrast this with the drilling permits issued by the US government,
which are granted by the Department of the Interior to the highest
bidders. Obtaining a permanent drilling license in the US, once
initial indications of the presence of oil or natural gas are found,
further requires paying a stiff upfront bonus.
“The Israeli system, issuing drilling permits ‘almost for free,’ led
to rent-seeking behavior,” complains Sheshinski, using a term
economists draw on to refer to profits made by someone solely because
he or she has obtained a state-sanctioned monopoly instead of honest
hard work. “Individuals issued a drilling permit in Jerusalem in the
morning would strike it rich by the time they returned to Tel Aviv in
the afternoon [by expensively selling exclusive rights they had bought
cheaply].”
Indeed, for years, oil exploration companies have been making
exaggerated claims about the imminent signs of striking it rich –
which almost always proved false but nevertheless artificially
inflated the companies’ share prices on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange.
Despite this, Sheshinski does not advise switching to a tender system
for drilling permits.
By now, he notes, so many offshore locations in the Mediterranean have
been explored that some companies would gain an unfair advantage under
a tender system. In fact, although there is supposed to be a maximum
of 12 permits per company, some have obtained 20 or more permits.
SHESHINSKI’S COMMITTEE FOcuses on the state’s revenues from successful
natural resource extraction.
The 1952 law established that, in exchange for the right to extract
natural resources and sell them, a company holding a license must give
the government 12.5 percent of revenues in royalty payments.
However, in order to compare with international standards, it is
necessary to consider what is termed the total “government take,” that
is, the total percentage that the state takes from an oil or gas
company’s profits, including royalties, direct taxes on profits,
corporate taxes, government subsidies of development costs, depletion
allowances, tax credits, and so on. Sheshinski displays a chart based
on figures taken from an issue of the Oil and Gas Journal, published
five years ago, with figures on average government takes in various
countries around the world.
The highest government takes are levied by countries that are not
exactly at the top of the Freedom Index tables. Sheshinski quips, “The
Good Lord did not distribute world energy reserves among countries
based on the quality of their governance.” Libya and Iran, for
example, have government takes of around 95 percent or more.
Ignoring those examples, Sheshinski concentrates on Western-style
democracies, members of the OECD. Norway, for example, has a take
between 75 to 79 percent. The comparable figures for the Netherlands
are 62 to 66 percent, for Denmark 62 to 64 percent, for Canada 60 to
63 percent, and for the United States 47 to 50 percent.
But if no changes are made to the existing rates, the total government
take in Israel in 2016 will be a mere 25 percent of the enormous
projected revenues: from Tamar over $40 billion and as much as $80
billion to $90 billion from Leviathan.
That is why his committee’s main recommendation is to levy a tax on
natural gas and oil fields. And it is that recommendation – which the
energy companies suspected was on the way and tried to ward off – that
led to the uproar. The Sheshinski committee has been accused of
“moving the goal posts.”
By imposing new rules “retroactively,” the companies accused, the
committee is unfair ly undercutting the assumptions and expectations
that had led them to undertake their very risky and expensive
explorations.
As long as it was unclear whether or not natural resources could be
found, say opponents of the committee’s findings, the state made
commitments for the sake of encouraging exploration – and then reneged
on those commitments as soon as it became clear that the results would
be positive. The implication is that if the energy companies had known
that the total government take might be raised, they would not have
conducted risky explorations in the first place.
REPRESENTATIVES OF THE energy companies refused to speak with The
Jerusalem Report. The Report has learned, however, that officials in
the major drilling partners at Tamar and Leviathan are still seething
at the Sheshinski Committee’s recommendations, which they compare to
the nationalization of oil industries in Latin American countries –
acts that they point out were accompanied by compensation paid to the
oil companies operating in those countries, while they will suffer
financial losses they estimate may be up to 60 percent of their net
present value without any compensation.
They also feel betrayed because they believed they had commitments
from senior government figures that no changes in tax policy would be
imposed on the Tamar field, which they counted on while pouring $1.3
billion so far into development at that site.
Sheshinski categorically rejects these arguments. “Governments always
make fiscal changes,” he points out. “Tax rates rise and fall, and
businesses adjust accordingly.
No government in the world can have its hands tied.”
In fact, Sheshinski points out, the energy companies were fully
informed all along that the government retained the right to make
these changes and they signed statements accepting that fact. “All the
drilling permits and licenses issued by the State of Israel, including
those issued to Noble Energy, included explicit statements that
taxation rates on oil and gas fields may be subject to change,” he
states.
And in response to those who keep waving the 1952 law and insisting
that its terms should be honored according to their “original intent,”
Sheshinski points out that if the natural gas had been discovered in
1952, the government take would have been 58 percent, because
corporate tax rate in Israel was very high in the 1950s (it is now
slated to drop to as low as 18 percent by the middle of this decade).
“Somehow,” he says dryly, “when the tax rates go down, no one ever
complains about ‘retroactive changes.’” Actually, Sheshinski says, his
committee was too lenient on energy companies. The committee’s final
recommendation leaves the royalty rates at 12.5 percent, while
imposing an oil and gas levy on profits that increases the government
take to between 52 to 60 percent. The taxes are imposed gradually and
incrementally. No taxes are due until recovery of 150 percent of the
investment in the exploration and development, at which point the tax
rate will be 20 percent and then increase progressively to 60 percent
after 230 percent of investment is recovered. The rates kick in so
gradually that some have estimated that it may take eight years of
production in medium-to-large wells before the government would get a
significant take.
http://www.jpost.com/JerusalemReport/Israel/Article.aspx?id=209691

 detto molto brevemente - diventera' un Paese esportatore di energia.
rubando il gas di Gaza. Che non è israeliano, ma queste sono
quisquilie...

 rubando il gas di Gaza.
ma allora proprio non leggi. Per questo non ti intendi di nulla.

 ma allora proprio non leggi
direi proprio di sì. Ma non la fuffa di chi ha deciso, davanti ai
propri tribunali, che il furto è legale
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=11680

 
http://www.globalresearch.ca
quelli che sclerano perche' le piazze arabe se la prendono con i
propri dittatori anziche' con i sionisti? Ma c'e' almeno una tua
lettura che non sia una cazzata?

 quelli che
dimostrano come il blocco navale di Gaza sia la copertura del furto di
gas.

 dimostrano
Global research non dimostra nulla, ed il giacimento di cui parla
l'articolo sta piu' a nord (tant'e' che ci ha provato il Libano, a
dichiarare che era suo - LOL)

 dichiarare che era suo - LOL)
Rotfl
-- 
recoil is insignificant when there is a tiger on the head of your elephant