By Sami Zaptia.
Tripoli, 5 July 2014:
Article 20 of the 2014 Budget (Law number (13) 2014 “Prohibits the Caretaker government from agreeing . . .[restrict]any new contracts or agreements or agreeing to any legal undertakings outside the frame of its daily caretaker administrative role.
Moreover, the 2014 budget goes further by prescribing that the “forthcoming government to undertake the necessary steps to limit the signing of any contracts for the implementation of any new projects except in very exceptional circumstances”.
Article 20 further prescribes “the need to refer to the contracting status for projects with the outstanding commitments and within the priorities of implementation and the cancellation of inactivated and unfeasible contracts”.
Although this is the first time that the transitional Libyan governments or the legislature has put this standing order in law, it has been accepted that during the transitional stage, the various governments did not have the authority to sign any new large contracts.
In reality, any contracts signed since 2011 have had to be, in theory, justified on the basis of immediate or urgent need. This prohibition has in practice included the non-payment of debts for existing projects that had been started during the Qaddafi regime.
These have included the railway project, the city metro projects, Tripoli International Airport, the Third Ring Road and the thousands of contracts for commercial and housing projects across Libya. [/restrict]
