Discount chairman Bachar: Don’t legislate exec pay limits

Yossi Bachar: My reform will give us a healthy, effective, and good capital market.

"I've heard many calls, each of which presented its own position, and I know that everyone wants to hear it, so I will begin by saying outright: what you see from here is not what you see from there. My opinion on capital market regulation and reforms has not changed substantially because of my change in jobs," said Israel Discount Bank (TASE: DSCT) chairman Yossi Bachar at the "Globes" Capital Markets Conference, held in Tel Aviv today in conjunction with BDO Ziv Haft.

At his former job director general of the Ministry of Finance, Bachar was responsible for the banking and capital market reforms that unofficially bear his name.

Bachar added, "The key result of the reforms is that we have a better capital market, a market full of credit, with increased access, and that is a fundamental issue in the development of the market. This success requires us to continue activity, and to work to improve things." He was referring to the private member's bill of MK Shelly Yacimovich (Labor) to limit executive pay.

Commenting on proposed legislation to limit executive pay, Bachar believes that the issue should be dealt with on the process side, not the administrative side. He said that there was no place for legislating executive pay, and that there were other ways of dealing with it.

"The capital market is a central component in the creation of a growth engine for the economy. We haven’t completed the process, and there's more work to be done. In my opinion, government intervention in the market should be reduced, in order to create more jobs, and regulation should be regularized. Further implementation of my reform recommendations, the Bachar reform, will give us a healthy, effective, and good capital market, and in the hope that this will drive the economy, we have grounds for optimism," Bachar concluded.

Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on May 5, 2010

© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd. 2010

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