Business in Brief

"We are approaching a major economic crisis likely to affect workers and employers, unlike any in past decades," said Histadrut labor federation chairman Ofer Eini at the end of last week. In his first public comment on the global financial crisis, he accused Finance Minister Roni Bar-On of refusing to establish a joint council with the Histadrut and employers to discuss ways to deal with the issue. Eini spoke at an event of the union that represents engineers, architects and other technology workers. The crisis is likely to cause companies to cut back, including layoffs, and unemployment is likely to rise significantly, said Eini, adding that it was necessary to prepare in advance. (Haim Bior)

Israel's foreign currency reserves grew by almost $2.5 billion in September to $36.12 billion. At the end of September 2007 they were only $29.12 billion. The main cause, according to the Bank of Israel, which manages the state's foreign currency reserves, is the bank's purchases in its program to buy $10 billion this year to raise Israel's reserves to $40 billion. In addition, the private banking sector increased its deposits with the Bank of Israel by $1.1 billion last month. (Moti Bassok)

After a three-month break due to the war between Russia and Georgia, Arkia renewed its charter flights to Tbilisi last Friday. Expectations are not very high that tourists will flock to Georgia, though Georgian National Airlines has continued its flights. The first Arkia flight, a Boeing 757, was two-thirds empty with only 70 passengers. It seems most passengers are businessmen with dealings in the two countries. (Zohar Blumenkrantz)

Cellular operator Partner Communications is raising its rates once again by an average of 6%. This is the second time in six months it is raising prices - in April its rates went up 4%. The Communications Ministry is now conducting hearings and hopes to ban the cellular companies from raising prices for customers during a contract's period; the change is expected to take effect within a few weeks. So it is no surprise that Partner is acting now. The company said the increase results from the erosion in cellular prices over the past year. (Barr Hayoun)

Yossi Segev, Arcadi Gaydamak's lawyer, will not necessarily be buying the Russian businessman's shares in Ocif as planned. Instead, Segev agreed in Tel Aviv District Court on Thursday to hold an auction to sell the shares in the next few days. A U.S. company, Bayshore Trading, told the court it was willing to offer $130 million for the shares, while Segev was paying only $110 million. The sale comes in response to a request by Bank Mizrahi-Tefahot to appoint a receiver for the shares to pay off Gaydamak's debts to the bank. Lawyers representing a number of parties suing Gaydamak, and who have liens on his property including the Ocif shares, were in court and agreed to the process. They said they want the sale to bring in as much money as possible. (Hila Raz)

Amdocs, which provides customer service and billing software, has signed a huge deal with Comcast, the largest U.S. supplier of Internet, cable and communications. The contract is estimated to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, but will probably be spread out over a number of years. Amdocs has worked with Comcast before, but now Comcast has committed to base its customer service, billing and network operations on Amdocs' products. (Nir Zalik)

Internet service provider Bezeq International released an estimate of its number of subscribers for the first time: about 600,000 at the end of June. This makes the company Israel's largest ISP, according to figures compiled by TheMarker. Next is 013 Netvision with about 550,000 subscribers at the end of the second quarter. 013 Netvision is the only ISP that includes these numbers in its financial reports. Bezeq and cable company Hot reported a total of 1.64 million Internet connections in Israel at the end of June. This gives number-three 012 smile.communications about 500,000 subscribers, but TheMarker has figures putting this number at 540,000. It is possible some companies are inflating their figures, or some customers have multiple connections. There are also a number of small ISPs that could account for the difference. (Amitai Ziv)