On October 20, 2026, Tamir Cohen bought 19,887,629 shares in YBOX. The transaction gave him roughly 5.4% of the Israeli property company. It was a measurable new beginning for an executive whose previous departure had been considerably less tidy. Two years earlier, he had left Shikun & Binui, the construction and infrastructure group he had helped bring under new ownership, then chaired and managed.
His career has a habit of placing him on both sides of the same desk. He negotiates a purchase, then takes responsibility for the business. He represents an owner, then considers becoming the controlling owner himself. The changes are easy to describe in a corporate announcement. Living through them means dealing with people, financing and projects that refuse to move at the same speed.
For Cohen, the route to the chief executive’s office ran through investment. His later move into YBOX brings that history back into view. The share register records the purchase precisely. The more interesting question is what experience arrives with the shares.
A signature before a job title
On August 6, 2018, the acquisition of Shikun & Binui shares from Shari Arison’s companies was completed. The purchasing vehicle, Capital Foresight Israel Investments Company, received 190,956,047 shares. Its ultimate controller was Naty Saidoff. The closing notice carried Cohen’s signature.
There is something usefully unglamorous about that document. An ownership change, with all its strategic promise, becomes a specific number of securities transferred on a specific day. Cohen had helped negotiate the purchase. He subsequently became the group’s chairman. His relationship with the company began with the arrangements that made ownership possible.
He brought a background that crossed property, finance and technology. His filed 2018 biography recorded investment leadership at Capital Foresight from 2013, earlier work at GSR Capital, and a chairmanship at technology company Evigilo from 2015 to 2017. It also listed an LLB and membership of the Israeli Bar. His education later recorded in executive biographies included advanced management studies at Wharton.
Los Angeles appears in another part of that earlier biography: volunteer leadership with the Israeli Scouts and the Israeli American Council. These roles sit alongside the investment appointments, an indication of how much of his professional and community activity had crossed between the United States and Israel before the Shikun & Binui years.
Buying a foothold in America
By February 2019, the American connection had become an explicit part of the group’s plans. Shikun & Binui announced the acquisition of i+iconUSA, an infrastructure contractor with operating businesses in the eastern United States. Cohen, then chairman, presented the purchase as a step towards expanding the group’s US activity.
The company already had a position in Houston’s SH288 fast-lanes project. Buying a contractor added local construction capability to that presence. An ambition to win projects needs people who can actually deliver them: crews, managers, subcontractor relationships and an understanding of how business gets done in a particular place.
The announcement said i+iconUSA’s leadership would remain. Expansion, in this instance, meant acquiring an existing organisation and its experience. For a group pursuing American public-private partnerships, the purchase connected the financing end of a project with the practical business of building it.
In May 2019, Cohen welcomed Eyal Lapidot’s appointment as group CEO. A little over a year later, their working arrangement ended. After Lapidot’s departure, Cohen took the temporary chief executive’s role himself while remaining chairman. A photograph of the two together catches one moment of a relationship that would soon become part of a leadership transition.
That transition made Cohen accountable for daily operations as well as boardroom direction. A chairman can approve a strategy. A chief executive has to keep returning to the details through which it becomes a business. For a group with construction, property, energy and concession activities, there were plenty of details available.
The clocks inside a construction company
A June 2021 project win shows the timescale Cohen was managing. A consortium including Shikun & Binui subsidiaries won the Fargo-Moorhead flood-diversion tender in North Dakota. The planned works included a 30-mile canal, highway and railroad bridges, and aqueducts. The estimated project cost at the time was $1.5 billion.
The announced arrangement extended far beyond construction. Operation and maintenance were to continue for 29 years after the anticipated six-year building period. The figures describe a business whose responsibilities can last much longer than any individual executive’s tenure.
They also explain the appeal of the model. A concession connects financing, construction and subsequent operation in one long undertaking. For the manager, that creates several clocks to watch at once: the contract timetable, the construction schedule and the obligations attached to the money. Winning is a beginning with considerable paperwork still ahead.
Cohen had a specific suggestion for another troublesome clock. During an industry interview in Eilat in 2022, he proposed reducing the betterment levy collected by a municipality when it took longer to issue a building permit. The suggestion put a financial consequence on administrative delay.
Its appeal is easy to understand from a developer’s chair. If waiting costs the applicant while the authority’s income is unaffected, the two sides experience the same delay differently. Cohen wanted their interests brought closer together. Bureaucracy rarely enjoys being given an invoice; that was rather the point.
A building can have a family history
Cohen’s public language could also move away from the transaction. Asked in 2023 about the meaning of Solel Boneh’s older buildings, he spoke about meeting former employees and their descendants. The work had become part of family memory, passed down through recollections of a parent or an uncle who had helped build something.
“we are proud of it.”
Tamir Cohen on Solel Boneh’s building history, 2023
Among the projects he singled out were the National Water Carrier, Ashdod Port and the Knesset. His choices joined infrastructure to the institutions and economic life it made possible. It was a way of describing construction through what people could do once the work was finished.
That perspective gave his role a historical dimension. A chief executive inherits buildings and relationships created before his arrival. His own decisions join an existing record. The pleasure Cohen described in those encounters with former employees sat alongside the more immediate requirements of managing the company.
When the arithmetic tightened
The later part of his tenure brought a harsher set of numbers. In February 2024, Shikun & Binui disclosed further losses connected with a halted Ethiopian highway project. Combined with an earlier charge, the losses associated with that project reached NIS 233 million. Devaluation of Nigeria’s currency was another source of financial pressure.
Those problems exposed the risks carried inside international construction work. A contract may be priced and planned, yet its outcome still depends on conditions outside the project office. A changing currency or an interrupted supply of materials can alter the financial result while the physical task remains much the same.
There was pressure closer to home too. The group had committed money to projects including a large Sde Dov site in Tel Aviv for rental housing. Rising interest rates made its borrowing more burdensome. By June 2024, the share price was about 65% below its May 2021 peak.
Saidoff became more directly involved in the company and publicly criticised its direction. On June 30, Cohen resigned. He said he saw an opportunity to assemble investors to purchase some or all of the controlling stake. Leaving management would allow him to pursue that possibility from outside the company.
The proposed purchase did not become a change of control. The relationship that had brought Cohen into the chairman’s office had ended in disagreement. The company’s formal record placed the end of his CEO and director tenures on June 30. Amit Birman took over the executive responsibilities.
Another entry on the share register
The next documented investment chapter came with YBOX. In September 2026, Gefen disclosed an agreement to buy shares alongside Cohen from entities held by YBOX’s controlling shareholder. October reporting recorded completion of the transaction and identified Cohen as YBOX’s chairman.
The terms put him into several connected roles. He was acquiring equity, receiving an advisory fee and borrowing money to help finance his purchase. Each element matters when considering the arrangement. A fee is compensation; a loan has to be repaid; shares expose their owner to what happens next.
YBOX’s development portfolio places him back among the practical questions of Israeli property: projects, planning and the path from an asset on a balance sheet to a building in use. The company’s work includes urban renewal, a field where the interests around a development extend well beyond the people negotiating its shares.
The distinction between an investor’s stake and an executive’s authority matters here. Cohen has worked through both arrangements, sometimes simultaneously. His career gives the ownership chart a human complication: the person negotiating a deal may also become the person asked to explain its results.
Cohen arrives with experience of acquisitions, an American expansion strategy and the management of a sprawling infrastructure group. He also arrives after a difficult corporate separation. Both belong in the record. A second act is allowed to begin with experience that has not been flattering at every turn.
The purchase gives this chapter a clear opening date. What follows will be measured in decisions, project progress and company results. For someone who has moved repeatedly between the transaction and the operation, it is familiar territory: the deal closes, and another calendar begins.