Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri received a delegation from the Council of the Press Order chaired by Aouni Kaaki. Many current topics were mentioned during this visit, the President of the Parliament answered all the questions. Here are the main points.
«We need to implement the laws in order to fight corruption.»
«This cabinet must succeed, it has no other choice», said the Speaker of the Legislative, Nabih Berri, ensuring that Parliament will hold the government accountable.
Regarding the fight against corruption, the President of the Parliament reiterated his call for the rigorous application of the laws to end this plague threatening the country. He revealed that «39 laws, some of which were promulgated more than 15, 10 or 8 years ago, have never been enforced.»«A country not subject to the laws is a hotbed of corruption, chaos and bankruptcy,» he said. The minister who refuses to appear before a court of justice or to summon a director general or head of the department under his ministry before the Attorney General of the Court of Audit Ali Ibrahim must report this refusal.
Appointment of 5000 employees
As for the appointment of 5000 employees, the President of the Parliament pointed that since the promulgation of the law on the budget, 5000 civil jobs have been decided without mentioning the jobs in the Security forces or the army. The finance and budget commission will appeal to all the concerned administrations that agreed on these employments and will hold them accountable.
Regional situation
Regarding the regional situation, the President of the House said that «positive developments had taken place. However, in my opinion, the region is still on the belt of fire and will remain so as long as a political solution is not found for Syria and Yemen.»
The construction of electric central is a better solution than the rental of ships to provide electricity.
Another issue discussed, the bitter file of electricity. As for President Berry, the Ministry of Energy was supposed, in an application of the law, to form an administrative council and a commission of regulation of the energy. «If these two bodies existed, we wouldn’t have needed to appeal to the services of two ships to provide electricity, which cost 2 billions of dollars per year, while this sum would have sufficed to ensure a solution to the problem of electricity in Lebanon until 2050. Lebanon has important national natural gas resources Regarding gas, President Berri said that «this file is at least sufficient to pay our debts. Blocks, including 8, 9 and 10 have been auctioned and are awaiting execution in 2019, but there are some attempts for postponements until 2020.» And he continued: «Israel has already taken a good part of the block 8 and a small part of the block 9. Companies engaged with Lebanon should dig at a distance of 20km from the borders, and withdraw the gas at the same time as Israel. This is how we can prevent them from stealing our reserve and avoid a heavy loss.»
He asserted that he will discuss the matter with the new Minister of Energy and Water Resources Nada Boustani, the head of Parliament did not fail to compliment the new minister as «intelligent, orderly, with good common sense, and has extensive experience in the field of energy.»
