Mar 06 2013 |
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Assembly delays grillings of oil, finance ministers - Dispute over legality of Khrainej's last-minute vote
By B Izzak KUWAIT: The National Assembly yesterday comfortably postponed the debate of the grilling of Oil Minister Hani Hussein for four months but needed some last-minute work to do the same for Finance Minister Mustafa Al-Shamali. The postponements came two weeks after the Assembly agreed to a government request to delay grillings against the ministers of communications and interior until the next Assembly term starting late October and after several MPs protested that it might be unconstitutional to delay grillings indefinitely. Thirty-nine MPs approved the postponement for the oil minister, 19 opposed while four lawmakers abstained.But the finance minister narrowly escaped from being grilled yesterday after only 32 MPs voted in favour of the delay, just one vote short of the required number of 33 votes. While Speaker Ali Al-Rashed was calculating the outcome of the voting and was ready to announce the result, deputy speaker Mubarak Al-Khrainej entered the chamber and voted in favour of the postponement, thus completing the required legal number.
But a number of MPs protested against allowing Khrainej to cast his vote after voting had finished. Rashed then adjourned the session. When he came back, he said his legal advisers gave two conflicting views - one saying Khrainej's participation was legal and the other insisting it was illegal. As a result, Rashed asked MPs to vote on the issue on whether to count Khrainej's vote or not and the Assembly agreed to count it, delaying the finance minister's grilling.
Hammad charged that what he had warned of happened regarding the Dow issue as the International Arbitration Court raised the compensation to Dow Chemical from the original $2.16 billion to $2.48 billion, after adding $318 million in costs and interest. He said that Kuwait is paying a daily interest of $250,000 to the penalty until it pays the compensation. The Arbitration Court had ordered Kuwait to pay the compensation in May last year, almost four years after the Cabinet scrapped the $17.4 billion joint venture between Kuwait's Petrochemicals Industries Co (PIC) and Dow Chemical.
© Kuwait Times 2013
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