Israel Grants Permit To Eli Rozenberg To Buy El Al, But Will El Al Sell?

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Globes is reporting that Israel has approved Eli Rozenberg’s application to buy a controlling stake in El Al.

Getting that permit was a precondition for coming to an actual agreement with El Al to buy the airline.

Eli Rozenberg is the twenty-something Israeli son of Kenny Rozenberg, US owner of Centers Heath Care nursing homes. Israel’s golden share of El Al requires that the owner of El Al be Israeli, so the offer had to come from Eli.

The Rozenberg offer is $75MM for a 45% controlling stake of the airline.

Whether El Al will sell is another story. The controlling Borovitz family seems to have no intention of doing so.

The Borovitz plan sure seems to have been to take government funds with the assumption that there would be no buyers, and then find a way to maintain control.

The emergence of a serious buyer threw a monkey wrench into those plans. I’m not surprised that they’re avoiding the would be buyers, but they’re going to be between a rock and a hard place if they think they’ll be able to avoid selling the airline and still get government bailout funding.

With the average El Al pilot making $334,000 per year and with some El Al pilots making as much as $562,000 per year, it’s not surprising that the company is in financial trouble and has been avoiding issuing refunds to customers with cancelled flights.

The fastest way to become a millionaire is to start as a billionaire and buy an airline. If the offer is accepted I wish the Rozenbergs the best of luck. They’re going to need it to turn that ship around!

HT: tavster, via DDF

32 COMMENTS

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  1. AF

    Let it go bankrupt and buy the assets. Who needs to deal with the corrupt unions, overpaid pilots and underpaid general labour?

  2. LF

    I’d love it if El Al were great again. Meanwhile, I would like them to make me whole again by not forcing me to make an unintended & illegal loan to them of thousands of dollars when they cancelled the flights I had paid for & had 7 days to refund, that being 4 plus months ago!!

  3. Sammy

    I know the Rozenberg’s , they are very smart people . If anybody can turn it around, they can .

  4. rob

    How the heck does the average El Al pilot make 330K+ a year?

    Are Israeli unions really that much more powerful than the rest of the Western world?

    • YoniPDX

      Combat Pay/Hazard pay?

      IIRC EL Al planes are the only commercial planes equipped with MDS to deal with SAMs.

      • Shmooger

        Uh, At least you think they’re equipped

    • Carl Sherer

      The Histadrut is the equivalent of the AFL-CIO, the Teamsters and the Mob all rolled into one.

    • Shmooger

      Do you know what a 787 pilot in Delta makes?

      • Barry

        $185k. A little more than half. lol

      • Carl Sherer

        Really curious about this. How much?

          • Dan

            Except it doesn’t say average LY 787 pilot, it says average pilot.

          • Shmooger

            Dan, don’t argue with me about this! Please. You stick to miles!!

            Delta and United pilots make this amount long-haul. It’s a very complicated & stupid business model that makes no sense at all with bidding, seniority, swapping, per diems, uplines and downlines, on duty-off duty and many different things. (Some LCCs figures this part out, but not all)

            I know this for a fact there are some Delta pilots flying widebody long-haul in senior positions making over half a million a year.

            Pilots making that salary is not the reason why airlines go out of business. Airlines are structured to be profitable that way, and pilots are paid that amount for their safety records. The reason why LY has so much financial issues has nothing to do with that. There’s a saying of English “a fish rots from the head down”, that should explain their entire issue.

          • Dan

            I’m not arguing, I’m pointing out a glaring problem in your comparing the average LY pilot fleetwide including 737s, to the average Delta flagship A350 CAPTAIN!

            That’s an absurd comparison.

          • men

            also one point dan missed most of elae flights are long haul thats y there average is more

          • Dan

            ALL Delta A350 flights are long-haul, so nope!

          • men

            delta A350 and elal is a good comparison 350k average

          • Dan

            No, comparing the average El Al pilot to an A350 captain is a truly terrible comparison, as I mentioned above.

          • men

            if most elal flights r long haul that can be compared to delta’s A350 as delta has most of there flights short haul so it brings down their fleet avarage

          • Dan

            Oy, no.
            There are NO Delta A350 short-hauls.
            There are tons of El Al short-hauls.
            It is a terrible comparison. Full stop.

          • Shmooger

            The points I missed. But still keep to your miles 🙂

  5. Chaimmayer

    Didn’t you say that he is really in his thirties?

    • Dan

      No, I’ve said there have been conflicting media reports between 20 and 30, but I’m told he’s in his mid-20s.

  6. Moshe

    As far as I heard they ran into some issues now as they want to know who the real identity of the buyer is

  7. Shmooger

    Now that they are miking El Al pay back 1 Billion NIS for cancelled tickets, maybe they will change their mind. Or maybe not.

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