About 500 Israeli high-tech companies, especially start-ups, that kept their funds in the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) are reeling in the wake of the bank’s collapse on Friday.
In an ironic twist of fate, the Israeli company Verbit, an Al transcription company that had a balance of $100 million in SVB when it collapsed, would have salvaged its money if it wasn’t for the government’s judicial reform plan, Globes reported.
When the bank’s shares began to plummet, the company’s senior officials discussed the option of transferring the company’s funds from SVP to an Israeli bank account but the CEO, Tom Livne, refused due to his opposition to the “judicial coup” in Israel.
A source close to the company told Globes: “Livne refused to withdraw the money when the collapse began out of belief in the bank and as a sign of solidarity with its situation and because of opposition to the judicial coup in Israel.”
A couple of months ago, Livne threatened to leave Israel and stop paying taxes due to the government’s judicial reform plan.
Additionally, the CEO of Israeli software company Papaya Global, Eynat Guez, announced at the end of January that her company was withdrawing all its funds from Israeli banks due to the judicial reform plan.
She went even further in early February, threatening: “If all of us, the heads of high-tech companies, remove in one day just 20% of the money we hold in Israeli banks…they’ll collapse…this is my right and even my obligation.”
In another ironic twist, Gadi Moshe, the co-head of the SVB branch in Israel, was one of the leaders of the high-tech protests against the judicial reform plan in Israel and urged investors to withdraw their money from Israeli banks.
According to a Channel 12 News report on Sunday, the Israeli SVB branch has closed in the wake of the main bank’s collapse and its 40 employees have been laid off.
“לשקר אין רגליים”
(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)
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6 Responses
good for him stick to his principles as he goes down the drain.
It’s hard to say someone deserved to lose $100 Million, but it seems in this case, the CEO deliberately lost his all his money for the sake of his ideology of “democracy” (read as: “My way is right, and yours is wrong, and I’m not used to not getting my way”).
This is the great irony. They’re calling a democratically decided vote in favor of judicial reform the “death of democracy”. If it is a death to anything, it is a death to the left’s elitist totalitarian control, which they have the chutzpah to call democracy.
In any non-democratic country (and given the role of the current judiciary as the de facto upper house of the parliament, with power to overrule the elected lower house), if you make the aristocracy mad, you will have a problem. A serious flaw in the zionist’s history is that, in part to reduce the influence of the rabbanim, and in part to establish the secular Ashkenazim as the ruling elite, they created an “ancien regime” that will need to be disposed of in order to restablish a democracy. As other countries (think France 1789, Russia 1917), the discredited aristocrats don’t go without a fight.
To yspgoldman: Your comment is excellent. You captured the real truth concisely and to the point.
Exactly the point.
Why didn’t they just ask chatGPT:
Are SVB deposits safe?
They didn’t lose their money…nobody did