Business in Brief

The consumer price index probably decreased between 0.3% and 0.5% in January, the government believes. The actual number will be published tomorrow. Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer is expected to leave interest rates unchanged. Factors pushing the CPI down include the 0.5% decrease in value-added tax, the decrease in gas prices and the drop in housing prices, along with the strengthening shekel. In total, the CPI is expected to increase 2% in 2010, putting it well within the price-stability range. (Moti Bassok)

Justice Minister Yaakov Neeman met with Knesset Finance Committee chairman Moshe Gafni last week in a bid to find a compromise that would increase judges' salaries, TheMarker has learned. The judges, led by Judge Varda Alshech, had been demanding a compromise for the 2009 salary freeze - a 3.3% raise. Gafni had objected. Neeman met with Gafni after the Finance Committee failed to reach a decision on the judges' demands last week. Four committee members wanted to give them the raise, while another four agreed with Gafni's proposal to postpone the raise until 2011. (Zvi Zrahiya)

The state prosecution wants tougher penalties for businessmen Oded Gold and Shlomo Vahnish, who were convicted of embezzling millions of shekels from the state by abusing the law for encouraging investments. "The law-enforcement authorities can deal with arch-swindlers and not just little fish," it declared. Last week, the prosecution petitioned the Supreme Court against the two men's sentences - eight years for Gold and six for Vahnish - which the Tel Aviv District Court handed down in December, 12 years after the investigation began. (Amit Benaroia)

Israel has natural gas fever, to judge by the line at the National Infrastructure Ministry's oil board. "Even when they discovered the Heletz field in the south [in 1955] people weren't lining up here, but this time even leading financial institutions have been backing all kinds of searches," a member of the ministry's oil board told TheMarker. The board member, Ron Nahman, who is also mayor of Ariel, said, "We haven't had this many requests and inquiries in the past nine years. There's never been interest like this." Nahman and the other eight board members are responsible for allocating drilling and exploration rights within Israel and off the country's shores. (Avi Bar-Eli)

If you send text messages in English, you probably should keep it that way: Hebrew-texting Israelis spend nearly twice as much as others do on text messages. The reason is technical: Messages using the Latin alphabet need 7 bits per letter, while non-Latin letters need 16 bits. The result is that Israel's cellular providers limit Hebrew and Russian text messages to 70 characters, while English messages get 160. The average text message costs 40 agorot in Israel, regardless of whether it's in English or Hebrew. It's clear who's profiting: Of that 40 agorot, 34 agorot are net profit for the cellular company. The Communications Ministry isn't addressing the issue - it's a technical problem and no solution has been found yet, it told TheMarker. (Amitai Ziv)