The big news over New Year's came form Israel's Delek Group. DGRLY is considering a $3.6 bn spinoff outside Israel of its energy holdings in a new company. The latter would own the subs engaged in oil and gas exploration offshore Israel: Delek Energy Systems, Delek Drilling LP, Avner Oil LP, Cohen Development & Industrial Bldgs, and Navitas Pete plus royalty rights for the Askelon and Noa leases and other energy royalties. Since Delek overall has a market cap of $4.3 bn, this would hollow out the stock.

The split would make DGRLY an insurance and financial services firm once again. Terms and conditions, notably the share-out of debt, will have to meet Israeli regulatory conditions to make sure they are fair to shareholders.

On Dec. 31, to prepare things, DGRLY sold 3% of its Phoenix Insurance arm, which it still controls, part of the original Delek Group financial services business.

Separately, Delek and its US operator partner Noble Energy agreed to make nice to the Israeli anti-trust regulatory which threatened to declare the Leviathan and Tamar offshore gasfield consortiums to be cartels. They agreed to sell the smaller Karish (Alon A 364)and Tanin (Alon C 366)fields to other owners in return for being allowed to leave the operating Tamar grouping and the future Leviathan one unchanged. Delek also contracted to sell more Tamar gas for electricity generation in Israel.

Meanwhile Woodside Petroleum of Australia is close to reaching a deal with the Leviathan partners for taking a 30% stake, a year after the letter of intent to do so was revealed, but at a higher price than bruited in 2013, for several hundreds of millions of dollars according to DGRLY sources. The Oz firm aims to liquefy and export part of the huge gas find.

In unrelated news, Canadian Solar today said it has sold a 10 megaWatt plant to Trans Canada, called Mississippi Mills in eastern Ontario, for $61 mn.