Modi Ben-Shach is leaving Paz Oil after ten and a half years as the company's CEO, after getting into a fight with the energy company's owner, Zadik Bino. His resignation comes into force in three months.

For months Ben-Shach and Bino had been arguing about the company's structure in the future.

Ben-Shach owns 6% of Paz's shares, worth about NIS 270 million.

A year ago Paz won a tender to buy the Ashdod oil refinery from the state. It beat other bidders with an offer of NIS 3.5 billion. That acquisition alone, leaving aside other aspects of change in the energy sector, meant that reorganization was in order. Another clear requirement for change is Paz's strategic ambition to expand its sources of income beyond Israel.

Paz needs to change into a form of holding company and separate its activities by division: refining, retail, overseas.

The form of reform led to a falling-out at the top, especially because CEO Ben Shach's sphere of authority would have been narrowed.

Ben Shach, 56, married with three children, has been in the energy sector quite literally all his life. His family owned gasoline stations. He himself also managed and owned shares in another energy company, Petrolgas.

In 1993 Petrolgas merged with Pazgas and Ben Shach was named CEO of the merged company. In January 1997, Bino promoted him to CEO of Paz.

In the last year Paz could mark major accomplishments, in the acquisition of the Ashdod refinery and in its first entry to the Palestinian fuel market, after it won a license to supply fuel distillates to the West Bank.

Paz has yet to name a successor to Ben-Shach. It is known that Ronen Wolfman, manager of the Mekorot water utility, is not in the running.