JERUSALEM (VINnews) — Likud MK Nir Barkat has refused to receive his salary since entering the Knesset in 2019. The salaries, which are required to be taken by law, have accumulated during this period to nearly 2 million NIS and are included in Israel’s budgetary requests to transfer budgets from 2021 to 2022. The Knesset has claimed that Barkat is causing the government to withhold the money and violate the law.
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When Barkat was elected to the Knesset he requested a salary of 1 NIS per year as he had earned while mayor of Jerusalem. The Knesset rejected his request since publicly elected officials must have a sizeable salary in order to prevent them relying on interested parties for financial incentives.
In 2020, when Barkat’s request was rejected, he said that “it is ridiculous that I need to fight with Knesset bureaucracy in order to save the public millions of shekels. Just as we educated our children to volunteerism, I am happy that I merited serving the public for a shekel a year. I didn’t take a car and I fly abroad on my own account and never asked for anything for myself.” Barkat attempted to pass a law permitting a Knesset member to waive his salary but it didn’t pass.
Barkat is the first Israeli billionaire to enter politics, with his personal fortune estimated at over 1 billion NIS. He is considered a frontrunner for Likud successor to Binyamin Netanyahu.
Let him donate his salary to Jewish causes (in Israel). Better than letting the government give it to Abbas.