(Bloomberg) -- Israel’s nascent wealth fund has grown to more than $500 million over less than three months, rising by almost half after receiving additional proceeds from the country’s Tax Authority.

The fund, which began operations in June, will initially avoid alternative investments, and focus instead on “normal, plain, vanilla traded baskets like ETFs,” according to Rony Halman, who sits on its board of directors. 

Known as the Israeli Citizens’ Fund, the long-delayed sovereign investment vehicle was set up by parliament in 2014 to channel surplus tax revenue from newly discovered offshore natural-gas fields in the eastern Mediterranean. 

Halman said in an interview on Wednesday that he believed the fund could one day reach 1 trillion shekels ($300 billion) in size -- at least five times bigger than official estimates -- but only if the government takes a more active role in Israel’s natural gas sector. 

Should the fund reach that goal, it would eclipse the current estimated size of Singapore’s Temasek Holdings Pte and Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala Investment Co.

“A government decision is needed to open the exploration of Israel’s offshore gas sector,” Halman said. 

Asked to comment on the $500 million assessment, a spokesperson for the Israeli Tax Authority said it would only be updating its figures for the fund in September.

Late Launch

The sovereign investor only started this year after accumulating 1.14 billion shekels in tax revenues. Under the law passed in parliament, the fund could begin operations after reaching a 1 billion-shekel baseline. 

The target has repeatedly been missed due to lower-than-expected tax revenue from the gas industry. 

Additional tax revenues from the natural gas sector were transferred to the fund, bringing the total sum to more than 1.6 billion shekels, Halman said. 

Halman is one of three external directors on the seven-person board managing the fund, along with Barry Topf, a former aide to Stanley Fischer when he was governor of Israel’s central bank, and Yarom Ariav, the ex-director general of the Ministry of Finance. 

Halman co-founded one of Israel’s first investment firms, Halman-Aldubi, back in 1995 and has since been involved in the oil and gas industry in both Israel and Cyprus. 

(Updates with reason for delayed launch under Late Launch subheadline. An earlier version of this story was corrected to remove reference to fund doubling in size.)

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