By Moutaz Ali.
Istanbul, 11 June 2014:
After months of waiting for the General National Congress (GNC) to approve the 2014 budget, the . . .[restrict]Caretaker Government of Abdullah Thinni has formally announced that it now deems that the budget has been automatically legally approved by the GNC.
After a meeting of the cabinet yesterday, the government published a formal statement explaining that its proposed budget to the GNC had in its interpretation been approved four months ago.
According to the government’s interpretation of the GNC’s internal laws, if Congress does not demand specific amendments to the proposed budget, then legally the budget is considered to be approved automatically.
“Article number 132 of law number 62 issued in the internal law of the GNC says that after four months of submitting the budget proposal without receiving requested amendments from the GNC, the government will consider the budget approved and will start giving allocations to ministries,” caretaker government spokesman Ahmed Lamin explained to Libya Herald.
Moreover, the cabinet instructed the Finance Ministry to correspond with the GNC president, asking him to cancel his instructions to the Central Bank of Libya (CBL) with regard to stopping all financial procedures that depended on GNC decisions numbers 38 and 40, which the government now considers invalidated by the Supreme Court ruling as unconstitutional.
Additionally, the cabinet appointed committees made up of representatives from the different ministries and charged them with finding immediate solutions to some of the country’s most urgent problems, such as bank security and the petrol and electricity crises.
Other committees were assigned to design an integrated security plan to safeguard House of Representatives elections on 25 June, reassess the current economic situation and ensure all Ramadan food requirements are in place.
The government also instructed all Ministries to compile “comprehensive” reports on the problems and barriers they face in implementing their activities in preparation for a review of its activities.
Finally, the cabinet meeting reviewed the UNSMIL initiative by Tariq Mitri on Libyan national dialogue and noted that it would have preferred that the report was presented to the Libyan government first, prior to its publication. [/restrict]
